They carried songs of Italy to France, to Provençe, inspiring the Troubadours. They had powerful poets, originators of their own, too. Most talented perhaps of whom, in mediæval days, was Jehuda ben Halevy, whose mistress and lady of sorrows, (to whom he dedicated his heart in song), was Jerusalem the Fallen, just as in a later day, Italy, the discrowned, dismantled Queen, was the mistress of inspiration of Poggio. During Moorish rule, in Spain, before the Inquisition, there was no position of honor, influence, where intellectual worth counted, where the Jew was not found. He was held in like esteem at Court of Robert of Naples, at time gay Boccacio was there paying poetical _devoir_, at the same time, both to Queen Joanna and Fiammetta. The world’s great wit and lyric poet, Heine, was a Jew. So were the philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza. Of the same race were the composers, Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn. And there may have been Jewish blood in Wagner. No one can prove there was not. Of this race were Auerbach, Heyse, Marcel Schwob, Daudet, Halevy, Mendes, Beaconsfield, Nordau, Brandes, Bernhardt, Rachel, and Jorge Isaacs, who wrote _Maria_, a South American classic, mentioning a few at random. And once, so the story goes, a Jew was king of Poland for a night. Perhaps the most remarkable feat, however, recorded of this race, is that when the Christian religion, like a tidal-wave, swept over Europe, destroying civilizations, the pagan world, where joy was king, they were the one race that did not succumb. Every other race has borne the imprint of its ideals. Who could dream an humble shepherd band from Judea could set at naught the tides of the world! The Renaissance does not equal the pagan world in beauty. Its madonnas, its units of architectural design, its saints of noble bodies, are but borrowings from the past. They are not original creation. The old beauty which was poignant because it was unselfconscious, because it kept the heart of man, its canary-throated joy, its hours of song, went out of the world then like a candle that is snuffed by a wind that is chill. _Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief._ Perhaps wisdom of perception is in this line. We who work today, work crippled, sad, limping, in comparison with them of long ago. Worst of all, confused! Dust covered, perhaps, but still taking space in the room of the mind, are too many irrelevant, accumulating objects. Too many foolish and cheap amusements. The free, yellow, sunlighted clean space of the whispering winds is not there. How ancient are words! When we play with them carelessly, we do not realize how freighted they are with history. They are queer unsteady little sail boats carrying all kinds of baggage of the soul. They fly merrily, briskly, down interminable rivers of Time.