Moses Chayim Luzzatto (born 1707, died 1747) was the son of very wealthy parents, natives of Padua. His father, who carried on an extensive silk business, spared no expense in educating him. The two ancient languages, Hebrew and Latin, which in Italy were in a measure a literary necessity, the one among Jews, the other among Christians, Luzzatto acquired in early youth; but they had an influence on his mind altogether different from that which they obtained over his contemporaries. Both enriched his genius, and promoted its higher development. Latin opened for him the realm of the beautiful, Hebrew the gates of the sublime. Luzzatto had a poet's delicately-strung soul, an Æolian harp, which responded to every breath with harmonious, tuneful vibrations. His poetic gift displayed at once power and sweetness, wealth of fancy and richness of imagery, combined with due sense of proportion. A believer in the transmigration of souls might have said that the soul of the Hebrew-Castilian singer, Jehuda Halevi, had been born again in Luzzatto, but had become more perfect, more matured, more tender, and endowed with a more delicate sense of harmony, encompassed as he was by the musical atmosphere of his Italian fatherland. Even in early boyhood every event, joyful or sad, was to him a complete picture, a little work of art, wherein color and euphony were revealed together. A youth of seventeen, he discerned with such remarkable clearness the hidden charm of language, the laws of harmony, deducible from the higher forms of eloquence as from poetry, and the grace of rhythm and cadence, that he composed a work on the subject, and illustrated it by beautiful examples from sacred poetry. He contemplated introducing a new meter into modern Hebrew poetry, in order to obtain greater variety in the succession of long and short syllables, and thus produce a musical cadence. The Hebrew language is usually classified among the dead tongues. To Luzzatto, however, it was full of life, vigor, youth, clearness, and euphony. He used Hebrew as a pliant instrument, and drew from it sweet notes and caressing melodies; he renewed its youth, invested it with a peculiar charm, in short, lived in it as though his ear had absorbed the rich tones of Isaiah's eloquence. Incomparably more gifted than Joseph Penso de la Vega, Luzzatto, likewise in his seventeenth year, composed a drama on the biblical theme of Samson and the Philistines. This early work gives promise of the future master. The versification is faultless, the thoughts original, and the language free from bombast and redundancy. His Hebrew prose, too, is an agreeable contrast to the insipid, ornate, and laboriously witty style of his Jewish contemporaries; it has much of the simplicity, polish, and vivacity of the biblical narrative. Before his twentieth year Luzzatto had composed one hundred and fifty hymns, which are only an imitation of the old psalter, but the language of which is marked by fervor and purity.