A year after the death of our poet, in 1853, there appeared in the same capital of Lithuania the historic novel _Ahabat Zion_ ("Love of Zion"). Its author, Abraham Mapu of Kovno (1808-1867), was a poor melammed who had by his own endeavors and without the help of a teacher raised himself to the level of a modern Hebrew pedagogue. He lived in two worlds, in the valley of tears, such as the ghetto presented during the reign of Nicholas, and in the radiant recollections of the far-off biblical past. The inspired dreamer, while strolling on the banks of the Niemen, among the hills which skirt the city of Kovno, was picturing to himself the luminous dawn of the Jewish nation. He published these radiant descriptions of ancient Judaea in the dismal year of the "captured recruits." [1] The youths of the ghetto, who had been poring over talmudic folios, fell eagerly upon this little book which breathed the perfumes of Sharon and Carmel. They read it in secret--to read a novel openly was not a safe thing in those days--, and their hearts expanded with rapture over the enchanting idyls of the time of King Hezekiah, the portrayal of tumultuous Jerusalem and peaceful Beth-lehem. They sighed over the fate of the lovers Amnon and Tamar, and in their flight of imagination were carried far away from painful reality. The naive literary construction of the plot was of no consequence to the reader who tasted a novel for the first time in his life. The _naivete_ of the plot was in keeping with the naive, artificially reproduced language of the prophet Isaiah and the biblical annals, which intensified the illusion of antiquity. [Footnote 1: See on this expression above, p. 148 et seq.] Several years after the publication of his "Love of Zion," when social currents had begun to stir Russian Jewry, Mapu began his five volume novel of contemporary life, under the title _'Ayit Tzabua'_, "The Speckled Bird," or "The Hypocrite" (1857-1869). In his naive diction, which is curiously out of harmony with the complex plot in sensational French style, the author pictures the life of an obscure Lithuanian townlet: the Kahal bosses who hide their misdeeds beneath the cloak of piety; the fanatical rabbis, the Tartuffes of the Pale of Settlement, who persecute the champions of enlightenment. As an offset against these shadows of the past, Mapu lovingly paints the barely visible shoots of the new life, the _Maskil_, who strives to reconcile religion and science, the misty figure of the Jewish youth who goes to the Russian school in the hope of serving his people, the profiles of the Russian Jewish intellectuals, and the captains of industry from among the rising Jewish plutocracy.