uld have kissed me tenderly, and I should
have recited in an ancient melody: 'A virtuous woman, who can find
her? Her price is far above rubies.' There would have been little
children with great candid eyes, on whose innocent heads I should have
laid my hands in blessing, praying that God might make them like
Ephraim and Manasseh, Rachel and Leah--persons of dubious
exemplariness--and we should have sat down and eaten _Schalet_, which
is the divinest dish in the world, pending the Leviathan that awaits
the blessed at Messiah's table. And, instead of singing of cocottes
and mermaids, I should have sung, like Jehuda Halevi, of my
_Herzensdame_, Jerusalem. Perhaps--who knows?--my Hebrew verses would
have been incorporated in the festival liturgy, and pious old men
would have snuffled them helter-skelter through their noses. The
letters of my name would have run acrosticwise down the verses, and
the last verse would have inspired the cantor to jubilant roulades or
tremolo wails while the choir boomed in 'Pom'; and perhaps many a
Jewish banker, to whom my present poems make so little appeal, would
have wept and beat his breast and taken snuff to the words of them.
And I should have been buried honorably in the 'House of Life,' and my
son would have said _Kaddish_. Ah me, it is, after all, so much better
to be stupid and walk in the old laid-out, well-trimmed paths, than to
wander after the desires of your own heart and your own eyes over the
blue hills. True, there are glorious vistas to explore, and streams of
living silver to bathe in, and wild horses to catch by the mane, but
you are in a chartless land without stars and compass. One false step
and you are over a precipice, or up to your neck in a slough. Ah, it
is perilous to throw over the old surveyors. I see Moses ben Amram,
with his measuring-chain and his graving-tools, marking on those stone
tables of his the deepest abysses and the muddiest morasses. When I
kept swine with the Hegelians, I used to say, or rather, I still say,
for, alas! I cannot suppress what I have published: 'teach man _he's_
divine; the knowledge of his divinity will inspire him to manifest
it.' Ah me, I see now that our divinity is like old Jupiter's, who
made a beast of himself as soon as he saw pretty Europa. Would to God
I could blot out all my book on German Philosophy! No, no, humanity is
too weak and too miserable. We must have faith, we cannot live without
faith, in the old simple things