If well or ill, if swift or slow,
Its parts shall work upon my pain.
Ay, of these things, alone is Thine
The knowledge. All my faith I place
Not in my craft, but in Thy grace.’
His ‘faith’ was perfect; it never failed him.
‘When I remove from Thee, O God,
I die whilst I live; but when I cleave to Thee
I live in death,’
is another saying of his, and so beautiful a one that it has found a worthy setting in the [a]יוֹם כִּפּוּר] service. But, intensely religious as was Halevi, and perhaps because he was so religious, he was of an extremely happy nature, and he seems to have had, in addition to his other doctoring gifts, the ‘cheerful heart which doeth good like a medicine.’ This cheerfulness is very apparent in all his compositions, and a great many of his poems seem actually to be bubbling over with joyousness. Though, like most of the Jewish authors of his age, Halevi was an Arabian scholar, and thoroughly well read in Greek literature, he wrote mostly in Hebrew, and, as it seems, by preference as well as from principle, used his genius on Jewish subjects. He drank at the classic well, he recognised to the full its charm and its use, but he was too thoroughly Jewish for it ever to be to him as ‘the fount of living waters.’ He warned his people, indeed, against the fascinating influences of ‘Grecian wisdom.’ ‘It bears not fruit, but only blossom,’ he says in his charming poetic fashion. There could be to Halevi but one ‘tree of life.’ His chief prose work is founded on the somewhat doubtful history of that Bulan, the Jewish king who is said tohave reigned over the Khozars in the eighth century. The legend—it is hardly history—tells that Bulan, startled into religious self-questionings by a vision of the night, summoned, next day, Jewish, Christian, and Mahomedan divines to talk to him of their faiths, in order that, open-eyed, he might choose from among them the most satisfying. The arguments of the Jewish doctors, it is said, proved the most convincing to Bulan, and the legend concludes with his conversion to Judaism,and the founding in his person of a Jewish dynasty which lasted some two hundred years.[40] This was a tale after Halevi’s own heart. He saw it all as it might have been, and made it not only into a stirring story, but into an interesting discourse concerning Judaism; and, that it might have the more readers, he wrote it in Arabic. Halevi’s love for his race and his religion was enthusiastic. ‘Israel among the nations,’ he says, ‘is as the heart among the limbs.’ But he was practical as well as poetic, and loyal as well as loving. He never neglected a patient for the sake of a poem, nor was he the less a faithful citizen of Spain because Jerusalem was to him, as he expresses it, ‘the city of the world.’ He had always a great desire to visit the lost land of his fathers. ‘Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,’ he writes in his beautiful poem on Jerusalem. But as he had not eagles’ wings, but only the plodding feet of a steadfast and God-fearing man, he set himself to do the work thatlay straight before him, and made of his unsatisfied longings no excuse for sloth, but a spur to endeavour. It is said by some writers that he did at last go to Jerusalem, and died there; and others assert that he was murdered by Arabs on the road thither; and yet others, that he never had even the happiness to start on the long-desired journey. In truth, of the actual facts of Halevi’s life we know, as absolute certainty, but few, and we have to build up his character, and guess at his circumstances, from his writings. These are fortunately plentiful, and there is no difficulty at arriving at some settled conclusions. From the love poems, which are 800 in number, we gather some knowledge of a happy home, and of a wife of ‘rarest worth and sweet exceedingly.’ Then there are quantities of letters to prove to us that Halevi was as faithful in friendship as in love. One of these epistles, written to a companion while absent on his travels, after regretting the loss of his society, adds, prettily and poetically enough, ‘Within our hearts thou ne’er art out of sight.’ Another, which is addressed to Moses Ibn Ezra, begins, ‘How can I rest whilst we are absent one from another? Were it not for the glad hope of thy return, the day which tore thee from me would tear me from all the world.’ An elegy, which Halevi wrote in 1138 on the occasion of Moses Ibn Ezra’s death, is one of his best known and best liked compositions. Moses Ibn Ezra was a relative of the witty, wandering Abraham Ibn Ezra, and one of that brotherhood of poetic philosophers. But the most characteristic of Halevi’s writings are his religious poems, and these show us ourpoet in the truest aspect of his short but many-sided life. ‘For Thy songs, O Lord, my heart is a harp,’ he says in one place; and here is a specimen of the melody of his heart-strings: