These lovers' tears often meet us in the Hebrew poems. Ibn Gabirol speaks of his tears as fertilizing his heart and preserving it from crumbling into dust. Mostly, however, the Hebrew lover's tears, when they are not tokens of grief at the absence of the beloved, are the involuntary confession of the man's love. It is the men who must weep in these poems. Charizi sings of the lover whose heart succeeds in concealing its love, whose lips contrive to maintain silence on the subject, but his tears play traitor and betray his affection to all the world. Dr. Sulzbach aptly quotes parallels to this fancy from Goethe and Brentano. This suggestion of parallelism between a medieval Hebrew poet and Goethe must be my excuse for an excursion into what seems to me one of the most interesting examples of the kind. In one of his poems Jehudah Halevi has these lines: SEPARATION So we must be divided! Sweetest, stay! Once more mine eyes would seek thy glance's light! At night I shall recall thee; thou, I pray, Be mindful of the days of our delight! Come to me in my dreams, I ask of thee, And even in thy dreams be gentle unto me! If thou shouldst send me greeting in the grave, The cold breath of the grave itself were sweet; Oh, take my life! my life, 'tis all I have, If I should make thee live I do entreat! I think that I shall hear, when I am dead, The rustle of thy gown, thy footsteps overhead. It is this last image that has so interesting a literary history as to tempt me into a digression. But first a word must be said of the translation and the translator. The late Amy Levy made this rendering, not from the Hebrew, but from Geiger's German with obvious indebtedness to Emma Lazarus. So excellent, however, was Geiger's German that Miss Levy got quite close to the meaning of the original, though thirty-eight Hebrew lines are compressed into twelve English. Literally rendered, the Hebrew of the last lines runs: Would that, when I am dead, to mine ears may rise The music of the golden bell upon thy skirts. This image of the bell is purely Hebraic; it is, of course, derived from the High Priest's vestments. Jehudah Halevi often employs it to express melodious proclamation of virtue, or the widely-borne voice of fame. Here he uses it in another context, and though the image of the bell is not repeated, yet some famous lines from Tennyson's "Maud" at once come into one's mind: She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so light a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.