Wake, Israel! Rouse! Your hour is come!
The crazed fanatics thirst for blood;
A flash! A glare!-Now ruins mark
Where late your peaceful dwellings stood!
Demoniac yells! fierce glittering steel!

The green turf red with many a stain, The maddened populace rushing on, 'Trampling like beasts o'er heaps of slain.

Ah, face the tiger in his lair

When thirsting-mad for human prey, But not these zealots in their rage,

He is more pitiful than they.

Their furiest passions all ablaze

These blood-hounds lust for human game,
Seeming like devils loosed on earth,
For they are men only in name.

No mercy in that zeal-crazed throng;
The infant from its mother's breast
Is torn with blood-stained hands and slain,
Her shrieks enjoyed with fiendish zest,
And from the mother's faithful heart,

That would have died her child to save, The life-blood flows, a sabre thrust,

Yet she could bless the hand that gave.

Better to die than thus to live!

With bleeding heart and maddened brain, She sees her husband fall; her sire, :

His gray hairs dashed with crimson stain, Nor age, nor sex were spared. O! God, } Can such fiends curse thy beauteous earth? And what their victim's high offense?

The only crime of Jewish birth!

The crime of following in the path.
Their pious fathers early trod,
Marked by One, who on Sinai's heights:
Revealed Himself a living God;

True, they knelt not to greet the sun,

Nor made the Moslem's creed their own,
Nor forced they their belief on man,
But asked the privilege alone

Of serving their Jehovah God,
As Abraham and Moses taught.
Their simple worship injured none,
And they no controversy sought;
O! Israel! People of my God,
When will thy weary wanderings cease,
O! when by Jordan's quiet wave,

Thy scattered remnant dwell in peace?

When will base calumny and wrong
Cease Judah to oppress thee more,
When will the wilderness bloom again
On Palestina's sea-girt shore,

When will our Hebrew maids once more
Chant Miriam's glad triumphant song?
The winds and waves swell with the cry,
"How long, our Father, O! how long!"
R. A. LEVY.

IN

How Long, O Lord?

N the weary night they come to me,
The tears that I left unshed,
When I trudged the thorny wilderness
With the sun-flame overhead.
I lie awake in the friendly night,
My soul too numb to pray,
Enjoying the cool of its velvet black
In the dread of the coming day..

For the day must come and the sting of it,
As I bend to the endless road,

The light must come and the pain of it—
The bite of the lashing goad.

But this I know as I reel along
To the nations' hue and cry,
A burning truth in the hand of God;
I know that I must not die.

They say my soul is twisted and warped,
My ways are cringing and mean,
That I worship the bulk of the calf of gold,
That my hands are not white and clean;
They say but a thousand reasons hold
To stalk the quarry then

When the lust for blood is hunger-felt
By the beast that dwells in men.

When Kindness is taught at the end of a rope,
And Love to the music of groans;
When Charity masks in a cloak of flame,
And Mercy in falling stones-
What wonder the balm for the spirit fails.
When the wounds are kept so fresh
Through countless years of active hate
In the rack of the tortured flesh?

I have ceased to long for the clasp of Love,
To dream of the smile of a friend,

I grip my trusty wander-staff

In a journey without an end.

My faith is strong as the primal rocks,.
And deep as my tearless woes;

I am Job of the nations-heir of wrongs,

But why-Jehovah knows.

ELIAS LIEBERMAN.

In Exile

TWILIGHT is here, soft breezes bow the grass,

Day's sounds of various toil break slowly off,

The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass
Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough.

Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass

With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth.

After the Southern day of heavy toil,

How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare To evening's fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil Up from one's pipe-stem through the rayless air. So deem these unused tillers of the soil,

Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak-tree, stare Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies,

And name their life unbroken paradise.

The hounded stag that has escaped the pack,

And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; The unimprisoned bird that finds the track Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell;

The martyr, granted respite from the rack,

The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,Such only know the joy these exiles gain,Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.

Strange faces theirs, where through the Orient sun
Gleams from the eyes and glows athwart the skin.
Grave lines of studious thought and purpose run
From curl-crowned forehead to dark-bearded chin.
And over all the seal is stamped thereon

Of anguish branded by a world of sin,
In fire and blood through ages on their name,
Their seal of glory and the Gentiles' shame.
Freedom to love the law that Moses brought,
To sing the songs of David, and to think
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught,
Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink
The universal air-for this they sought

Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain,
And truth's perpetual lamp forbid to wane.

Hark! through the quiet evening air, their song Floats forth with wild sweet rhythm and glad refrain.

They sing the conquest of the spirit strong,

The soul that wrests the victory from pain; The noble joys of manhood that belong

To comrades and to brothers. In their strain Rustle of palms and Eastern streams one hears, And the broad prairie melts in mist of tears. EMMA LAZARUS.

A Cry from Russia

BROTHERS, my brothers--you that are free

In the golden lands, beyond the sea,

Are you blind that you do not heed the scars
Of
my futile hands as they beat the bars?!
Are you deaf that you do not heed the cry
Of the Little People who will not die?
Who will not die though with fear
Without their Ghetto walls. Ah, hear
The anguished cry of the mother of sons
Who are spat on thus by the lordly ones:

"Ye may not labor. Ye have no goal.
Back to your hovels! Herd as the swine!
Be eaten with fear to your very soul!"
This is the birth of the coward's whine.
Brothers, my brothers, the days are long
For the wretched one who does no wrong,
But to live through beggary, misery-aye
Worse than these a Jew till he die.

For he sucked, with the milk at his mother's breast, Patient for scorn and patient for jest,

Wounds of the body and wounds of the soul

Till a day when the Lord God made him whole

The shining day he will bless the pain

That has brought the Jew to his own again.

He will bless the pain. But brothers mine
Easy for you not to herd as swine;