What is it that appeals to us in Ibn Gebirol’s poetry? Dr. Cowley attributes his charm to “the youthful freshness” of his verses, “in which he may be compared to the romantic school in France and England in the early nineteenth century.” This same feature was also detected by al-Harizi--a better critic than poet. In fact, it was his appreciation of Ibn Gebirol’s “youthful freshness” that led him to assert that the poet died before his thirties had been completed. Al-Harizi treats Ibn Gebirol’s successors as his imitators. There is a large element of truth in this. One fact only need be quoted in evidence. Ibn Gebirol entitled his longest poem the “Royal Crown” (partly, no doubt, because of the frequent comparison of God to the King in the Scriptures). Now, the title “Royal Crown” passed over to designate a type of poem. We find several versifiers who later on wrote “Royal Crowns,” just as we speak of an orator uttering a “Jeremiad” or a “Philippic.” Heine, supreme among the modern Romantics in Germany, recognized this same freshness of inspiration in this freshest of the Spanish Hebrew poets: a pious nightingale singing in the Gothic medieval night, a nightingale whose Rose was God--these are Heine’s phrases. Gustav Karpeles again and again claims that Ibn Gebirol was the first poet thrilled by “that peculiar ferment characteristic of a modern school”--a ferment which the Germans name _Weltschmerz_. Clearly, Karpeles made a good point by showing that Schopenhauer--of whom it may be doubted whether he despised women or Jews more heartily--the apostle of _Weltschmerz_, had as a predecessor, eight centuries before his time, the despised Jew, the “Faust of Saragossa.” This is another of Karpeles’ epithets for Ibn Gebirol, who spent, indeed, some years in Saragossa, but had little of the Faust in him. If, however, we attribute to Ibn Gebirol the feeling of _Weltschmerz_, we must be cautious before we identify his sense of the “world’s misery” with modern pessimism. Ibn Gebirol’s was, no doubt, a lonely and even melancholy life. But though he often writes sadly, though he would have sympathized with William Allingham’s sentiment: Sin we have explained away, Unluckily the sinners stay; yet the final outcome of his realization of human failings and human pain was hope and not despair. And this I say not because Ibn Gebirol appreciated the humor of life as well as its miseries. It is not his humorous verses on which I should base my belief in his optimism. For I regard as the epitome, or rather, essential motive of the “Royal Crown,” the lines: Thou God, art the Light That shall shine in the soul of the pure; Now Thou art hidden by sin, by sin with its cloud of night. Now Thou art hidden, but then, as over the height, Then shall Thy glory break through the clouds that obscure, And be seen in the mount of the Lord.