On a first reading, these last two lines strike one as oddly out of place in a love poem. But as we look again, they seem to suggest, that in a nature so full and wholesome as Halevi’s, love did not lead to a selfish forgetfulness, nor marriage mean a joy which could hold by its side no care for others. Rather to prove that love at its best does not narrow the sympathies, but makes them widen and broaden out to enfold the less fortunate under its happy, brooding wings. And though at the crowning moment of his life Halevi could spare a tender thought for his ‘tribe,’ with very little right could the foolish, favourite epithet of ‘tribalism’ be flung at him, and with even less of justice at his race. In truth, they were ‘patriots’ in the sorriest, sincerest sense--this dispossessed people, who owned not an inch of the lands wherein they wandered, from the east unto the west. It is prejudice or ignorance maybe, but certainly it is not history, which sees the Jews as any but the faithfullest of citizens to their adopted States; faithful, indeed, often to the extent of forgetting, save in set and prayerful phrases, the lost land of their fathers. Here is a typical national song of the twelfth century, in which no faintest echo of regret or of longing for other glories, other shrines, can be discerned:-- ‘I found that words could ne’er express The half of all its loveliness; From place to place I wander’d wide, With amorous sight unsatisfied, Till last I reach’d all cities’ queen, Tolaitola[4] the fairest seen. * * * * * Her palaces that show so bright In splendour, shamed the starry height, Whilst temples in their glorious sheen Rivall’d the glories that had been; With earnest reverent spirit there, The pious soul breathes forth its prayer.’ The ‘earnest reverent spirit’ may be a little out of drawing now, but that ‘fairest city seen’ of the Spanish poet,[5] might well stand for the London or Paris of to-day in the well-satisfied, cosmopolitan affections of an ordinary Englishman or Frenchman of the Jewish faith. And which of us may blame this adaptability, this comfortable inconstancy of content? Widows and widowers remarry, and childless folks, it is said, grow quite foolishly fond of adopted kin. With practical people the past is past, and to the prosperous nothing comes more easy than forgetting. After all-- ‘What can you do with people when they are dead? But if you are pious, sing a hymn and go; Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go, But go by all means, and permit the grass To keep its green fend ’twixt them and you.’[6]