shall be forgotten. And who escapes his lot? Not a single one of
us all. None is secure from death. Wealth, wisdom, strength,
beauty, all are nothing, nothing...."

In a burst of revolt, our poet exclaims:

"If I knew that my voice with its reverberations sufficed to
destroy the earth and the fulness thereof, and all the hosts of
heaven, I would cry with a thundering noise: Cease! Myself I
would return to nothing with the rest of mankind. Know not the
living that the grave will swallow them up after a life of
sadness and cruel misery? See they not that the whole of human
life is like the flash that goes before the fatal thunderbolt?"

The same train of thought is not met with again until we come down to
our own time, and Maupassant himself does not present it with greater
vigor in _Sur l'eau_.

And the end of the matter is that "man has nothing but the consciousness
of sorrow; he is naked and starved, feeble and without energy. His soul
desires all that he has not, and so he longs and languishes day and
night."

The uncertainty caused by the certainty of death, the terror inspired by
the fatal end, the aching regrets over the parting with dear ones, these
feelings, which possess even the devoutest Jew, are expressed in one of
Lebensohn's most beautiful poems, "The Death Agony", and in "Knowledge
and Death" the skepticism of the Maskil prevails over the optimism of
the Jew.