erwards to Goettingen, that I
might take a larger outlook on my people, and on the Gentile world, and
drank knowledge at all sources. I was a youth; I felt free; I saw our
chief seats in Germany; I was not then in utter poverty. And I had
possessed myself of a handicraft. For I said, I care not if my lot be
as that of Joshua ben Chananja: after the last destruction he earned
his bread by making needles, but in his youth he had been a singer on
the steps of the Temple, and had a memory of what was before the glory
departed. I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the
hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance
where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
I knew what I chose. They said, 'He feeds himself on visions,' and I
denied not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. I
see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew.
You are not listening to one who raves aloof from the lives of his
fellows."

Mordecai paused, and Deronda, feeling that the pause was expectant,
said, "Do me the justice to believe that I was not inclined to call
your words raving. I listen that I may know, without prejudgment. I
have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a
spiritual destiny embraced willingly, and embraced in youth."

"A spiritual destiny embraced willingly--in youth?" Mordecai repeated
in a corrective tone. "It was the soul fully born within me, and it
came in my boyhood. It brought its own world--a mediaeval world, where
there are men who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of
exile. They had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith
of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a center for our race. One of
their souls was born again within me, and awakened amid the memories of
their world. It traveled into Spain and Provence; it debated with
Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the
Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And when its dumb tongue
was loosed, it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood
of their ardor, their sorrow, and their martyred trust: it sang with
the cadence of their strain."

Mordecai paused again, and then said in a loud, hoarse whisper--

"While it is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another."

"Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?" said Deronda, remembering
with some anxiety the former questi