Beauty! Poetry! This was what he needed most. This was what that old world gave. What delight did his fathers know, generation beyond generation, in the comely things of the world? What statuary had come down and what pictures of burnished gold and azure? What dances were there to the rising sun and in procession with the slow stars? If any of his fathers had made him a graven image, he was stoned and the thunders of those hoary enemies of lovely things shook over the cowering tribes. There had descended to him a tradition of tragedy and pride. Of beauty, none. There was, for example, the _shool_. How the air was foetid! How the walls were bare! How the hangings before the ark were tawdry! How the prayers were raucous, how the air drooped for lack of poetry! Ah! the sense of relief which began to possess him when now, throwing forward his chest, and breathing even in midmost Doomington the deep air of liberty, he realized how vain were all his innumerable ceremonies; that God did not require of him these things and these; He did not sit there watchfully counting the syllables of prayer His votaries uttered, sit there like a miser counting his pieces of gold; that the subterfuges and evasions of ritual which had given him frequent unease were not fraught with more than a merely local and temporary danger. Forward from phylacteries! They had slipped from his arms like manacles. They lay discarded like the slough of a serpent, coiled round his feet. What there was now of poetry in the Feast of Tabernacles, in the prophetic and vague beards of the old men, in the synagogue-chanting on darkening Saturday evenings, in the mingled array of the Passover Tables, in the puckered faces of the antique women muttering their year-long prayers, in the blast of the liberating horn upon the Fast of Atonement--what there was of poetry in them, he was free to understand; for they were shorn of all that had made them forbidding; they were not symbols of dark terror, they were pathways into the heart of the world. And with these he was free to understand what there was of poetry in the vague Christian lilies, in the burning of candles before the shrines of picturesque saints, brothers of those other and marble gods. All that these Greek gods had of poetry and all their groves and their broad-browed morning lads and the virginal worshippers before those altars of poetry--all, all these things were his. He was winning to freedom after much slavery.