have died to save humanity, if I did not at the same time suspect humanity was not worth saving. To be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, what a tragedy! No, your limited intellects are happier: those that see life in some one noble way, and in unity find strength. I should have loved to be a Milton--like one of your English cathedrals, austere, breathing sacred memories, resonant with the roll of a great organ, with painted windows, on which the shadows of the green boughs outside wave and flicker, and just hint of Nature. Or one of your aristocrats with a stately home in the country, and dogs and horses, and a beautiful wife. In short, I should like to be your husband. Or, failing that, my own wife, a simple, loving creature, whose idea of culture is cabbages. _Ach_, why was my soul wider than the Ghetto I was born in? why did I not mate with my kind?" He broke into a fit of coughing, and "little Lucy" thought suddenly of the story that all his life-sadness and song-sadness was due to his rejection by some Jewish girl in his own family circle. "I tire you," she said. "Do not talk to me. I will sit here a little longer." "Nay, I have tired _you_. But I could not but tell you my thoughts; for you are at once a child who loves and a woman who understands me. And to be understood is rarer than to be loved. My very parents never understood me. Nay, were they my parents--the mild man of business, the clever, clear-headed, romance-disdaining Dutchwoman, God bless her? No, my father was Germany, my mother was the Ghetto. The brooding spirit of Israel breathes through me that engendered the tender humor of her sages, the celestial fantasies of her saints. Perhaps I should have been happier had I married the first black-eyed Jewess whose father would put up with a penniless poet. I might have kept a kitchen with double crockery and munched Passover cakes at Easter. Every Friday night I should have come home from the labors of the week and found the table-cloth shining like my wife's face, and the Sabbath candles burning, and the Angels of Peace sitting hidden beneath their great invisible wings, and my wife, piously conscious of having thrown the dough on the fire, would have kissed me tenderly, and I should have recited in an ancient melody: 'A virtuous woman, who can find her? Her price is far above rubies.' There would have been little children with great candid eyes, on whose innocent heads I should have laid my hands in blessing, praying that God might make them like Ephraim and Manasseh, Rachel and Leah--persons of dubious exemplariness--and we should have sat down and eaten _Schalet_, which is the divinest dish in the world, pending the Leviathan that awaits the blessed at Messiah's table. And, instead of singing of cocottes and mermaids, I should have sung, like Jehuda Halévi, of my _Herzensdame_, Jerusalem. Perhaps--who knows?--my Hebrew verses would have been incorporated in the festival liturgy, and pious old men