‘Lo! my light has pierced to the dark abyss, I have brought forth gems from the gloomy mine; Now the fools would see them! I ask you this: Shall I fling my pearls down before the swine? From the gathered cloud shall the raindrops flow To the barren land where no fruit can grow?’(1) The little grumble is characteristic, but in actual fact no land was ‘barren’ to his hopeful, sunny temperament. In the ‘morning he sowed his seed, and in the evening he withheld not his hand,’ and from his ‘gathered clouds,’ the raindrops fell rainbow-tinted. The love songs, which a trustworthy edition tells us were written to his wife, are quite as beautiful in their very different way as an impassioned elegy he wrote when death claimed his friend, Aben Ezra, or as the famous ode he composed on Jerusalem. Halevi wrote prose too, and a bulky volume in Arabic is in existence, which sets forth the history of a certain Bulan, king of the Khozars, who reigned, the antiquarians agree, about the beginning of the eighth century, over a territory situate on the shores of the Caspian Sea. This Bulan would seem to have been of a hesitating, if not of a sceptical, turn of mind in religious matters. Honestly anxious to be correct in his opinions, his anxiety becomes intensified by means of a vision, and he finally summons representative followers of Moses, of Jesus, and of Mahomet, to discuss in his presence the tenets of their masters. These chosen doctors of divinity argue at great length, and the Jewish Rabbi is said to have best succeeded in satisfying the anxious scruples of the king. The same authorities tell us that Bulan became an earnest convert to Judaism, and commenced in his own person a Jewish dynasty which endured for more than two centuries. Over these more or less historic facts Halevi casts the glamour of his genius, and makes, at any rate, a very readable story out of them, which incidentally throws some valuable side-lights on his own way of regarding things. Unluckily, side-lights are all we possess, in place of the electric illuminating fashion of the day. Those copious details, which our grandchildren seem likely to inherit concerning all and sundry of this generation, are wholly wanting to us, the earlier heirs of time. Of Halevi, as of greater poets, who have lived even nearer to our own age, history speaks neither loudly nor in chorus. Yet, for our consolation, there is the reflection that the various and varying records of ‘Thomas’s ideal John: never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either,’ may, in truth, help us but little to a right comprehension of the ‘real John, known only to His Maker.’ Once get at a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy. And thus though our facts are but few and fragmentary concerning the man of whom one admirer quaintly says that, ‘created in the image of God’ could in his case stand for literal description, yet may we, by means of