The popular poem, _i.e._ the tunable song, had only two purposes, to amuse and to prepare a way for the Reform. But these did not exhaust all the possibilities of poetic compositions and, in fact, were not the only ones to task the powers of the Judeo-German versifiers. An opportunity for more extended themes was given the badchens in their songs of contemplation, in which the moralizing tendency needed only to be developed at the expense of the allegory, in order to change the song into a rhymed sermon. Nor was the public unprepared for serious matters, for the greater part of all Judeo-German literature had been merely treatises of an ethical character in which the element of sadness caused by centuries of suffering predominated. The perfection of art is to the mind of a Jew its ability to move to tears. It is expected of the violinist that he shall play the saddest tunes in the minor key, such as will make his hearers weep like 'beavers'; the precentor's reputation depends on his powers to crush his audience, to call forth contrition of spirit, to make the hearts bleed; and the author who can make his reader dissolve in tears, no matter how absurd the story, is sure to become popular with a Jewish public. We have seen how the badchen at the marriage ceremony bade the bride to weep, and it has also been mentioned that he delivered the more serious discourses upon that occasion. It was then that he would spin out hundreds of stanzas upon such subjects as 'The Unhappy Man,' 'Pity,' 'Dialogue of the New-born Soul with the Angel of Life,' 'Sorrow,' and the like. In the meanwhile, the old rhymed moral treatises continued in force and gave rise to compositions of a more regular structure. Two authors must here be specially mentioned, S. Sobel and Elieser Zwi Zweifel. The first published, in 1874, a book under the title of 'Destiny, or Discussions for Pleasant Pastime,' in which he makes use of the popular method of disputes between various objects in order to inculcate a series of moral truths. He excels in the use of a vigorous, idiomatic language, while Zweifel has shown what strength there lies in the employment of the simplest words for a similar kind of literature. Zweifel's[59] older productions, only two in number, are, one, a translation from the Hebrew, the other probably an imitation of a foreign model. The first contains a series of aphorisms, while the other teaches the wisdom of life in the testament of a dying father. These verses, like his prose works, belong among the most cherished writings of the Russian Jews and have been reprinted in a large number of editions. After his death another one of his poems was published which differs from its predecessors in that it is somewhat more elaborate and is entirely original.