‘When I remove from Thee, O God, I die whilst I live; but when I cleave to Thee I live in death,’ is another saying of his, and so beautiful a one that it has found a worthy setting in the יוֹם כִּפּוּר service. But, intensely religious as was Halevi, and perhaps because he was so religious, he was of an extremely happy nature, and he seems to have had, in addition to his other doctoring gifts, the ‘cheerful heart which doeth good like a medicine.’ This cheerfulness is very apparent in all his compositions, and a great many of his poems seem actually to be bubbling over with joyousness. Though, like most of the Jewish authors of his age, Halevi was an Arabian scholar, and thoroughly well read in Greek literature, he wrote mostly in Hebrew, and, as it seems, by preference as well as from principle, used his genius on Jewish subjects. He drank at the classic well, he recognised to the full its charm and its use, but he was too thoroughly Jewish for it ever to be to him as ‘the fount of living waters.’ He warned his people, indeed, against the fascinating influences of ‘Grecian wisdom.’ ‘It bears not fruit, but only blossom,’ he says in his charming poetic fashion. There could be to Halevi but one ‘tree of life.’ His chief prose work is founded on the somewhat doubtful history of that Bulan, the Jewish king who is said to have reigned over the Khozars in the eighth century. The legend――it is hardly history――tells that Bulan, startled into religious self-questionings by a vision of the night, summoned, next day, Jewish, Christian, and Mahomedan divines to talk to him of their faiths, in order that, open-eyed, he might choose from among them the most satisfying. The arguments of the Jewish doctors, it is said, proved the most convincing to Bulan, and the legend concludes with his conversion to Judaism, and the founding in his person of a Jewish dynasty which lasted some two hundred years.[40] This was a tale after Halevi’s own heart. He saw it all as it might have been, and made it not only into a stirring story, but into an interesting discourse concerning Judaism; and, that it might have the more readers, he wrote it in Arabic. Halevi’s love for his race and his religion was enthusiastic. ‘Israel among the nations,’ he says, ‘is as the heart among the limbs.’ But he was practical as well as poetic, and loyal as well as loving. He never neglected a patient for the sake of a poem, nor was he the less a faithful citizen of Spain because Jerusalem was to him, as he expresses it, ‘the city of the world.’ He had always a great desire to visit the lost land of his fathers. ‘Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,’ he writes in his beautiful poem on Jerusalem. But as he had not eagles’ wings, but only the plodding feet of a steadfast and God-fearing man, he set himself to do the work that lay straight before him, and made of his unsatisfied longings no excuse for sloth, but a spur to endeavour.