finable foreboding?

III

It was the day of Messianic dreams. In the century that was over,
strange figures had appeared of prophets and martyrs and Hebrew
visionaries. From obscurity and the far East came David Reubeni,
journeying to Italy by way of Nubia to obtain firearms to rid
Palestine of the Moslem--a dark-faced dwarf, made a skeleton by fasts,
riding on his white horse up to the Vatican to demand an interview,
and graciously received by Pope Clement. In Portugal--where David
Reubeni, heralded by a silken standard worked with the Ten
Commandments, had been received by the King with an answering
pageantry of banners and processions--a Marrano maiden had visions of
Moses and the angels, undertook to lead her suffering kinsfolk to the
Holy Land, and was burnt by the Inquisition. Diogo Pires--handsome and
brilliant and young, and a Christian by birth--returned to the faith
of his fathers, and, under the name of Solomon Molcho, passed his
brief life in quest of prophetic ecstasies and the pangs of
martyrdom. He sought to convert the Pope to Judaism, and predicting a
great flood at Rome, which came to pass, with destructive earthquakes
at Lisbon, was honored by the Vatican, only to meet a joyful death at
Mantua, where, by order of the Emperor, he was thrown upon the blazing
funeral pyre. And in these restless and terrible times for the Jews,
inward dreams mingled with these outward portents. The _Zohar_--the
Book of Illumination, composed in the thirteenth century--printed now
for the first time, shed its dazzling rays further and further over
every Ghetto.

The secrets reserved for the days of the Messiah had been revealed in
it: Elijah, all the celestial conclave, angels, spirits, higher souls,
and the Ten Spiritual Substances had united to inspire its composers,
teach them the bi-sexual nature of the World-Principle, and discover
to them the true significance of the _Torah_ (Law), hitherto hidden in
the points and strokes of the Pentateuch, in its vowels and accents,
and even in the potential transmutations of the letters of its words.
Lurya, the great German Egyptian Cabalist, with Vital, the Italian
alchemist, sojourned to the grave of Simon bar Yochai, its fabled
author. Lurya himself, who preferred the silence and loneliness of the
Nile country to the noise of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white
on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of
the Ineffable Name, and who by permut