Fifty translations cannot spoil the true ring in such fervid words as these. And in a world so sadly full of ‘fond desires,’ destined to remain for ever unfulfilled, it is pleasant to know that Halevi accomplished his. He unquestionably travelled to Palestine; whether his steps were stayed short of Jerusalem we know not, but he undoubtedly reached the shores, and breathed ‘the air of that land which makes men wise,’ as in loving hyperbole a more primitive patriot[8] expresses it. And seeing how that ‘the Lord God doth like a printer who setteth the letters backward,’[9] there is small cause, perchance, for grieving in that the breath our poet drew in the land of his dreams was the breath not of life but of death. THE STORY OF A STREET To the ear and eye that can find sermons in stones, streets, one would fancy, must be brimful of suggestive stories. There might be differences of course. From a stone of the polished pebble variety, for instance, one could only predict smooth platitudes, and the romance in a block of regulation stucco would possibly turn out a trifle prosaic. But the right stone and the right street will always have an eloquence of their own for the right listener or lounger, and certain crumbling old tenements which were carted away as rubbish some few years ago in Frankfort must have been rarely gifted in this line. ‘Words of fire,’ and ‘written in blood,’ would, in truth, have no parabolic meaning, if the stones of that ancient _Judengasse_ suddenly took to story-telling. A long record of sorrow, and wrong, and squalid romance, would be unfolded, and, inasmuch as the sorrows have been healed and the wrongs have been righted, it may not be uninteresting to look for a moment at the picturesque truths that lie hidden under that squalid romance, which, like a mist, hung for centuries over the Jews’ quarter.