"Like a gray forest, his hair; and cast a weird shadow on the face which looked out through it,—his troubled pale face, with the spiritual eyes.
"So he sat and sang, like unto a seer out of the foretime to look upon;
Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to have risen out of his grave.
"But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on his barb, lolling in his saddle, and brandishing a naked javelin;
"Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his deadly shaft, and shot away like a winged shadow.
"Quietly flowed the Rabbi's life-blood, quietly he sang his song to an end; and his last dying sigh was Jerusalem!"
But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing a public dispute, before King Pedro and his Court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on the merits of their respective faiths. In the strain of the Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its rigid defiant Monotheism, appear:—
"Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for mankind; he is no gushing philanthropist, no declaimer.
"Our God is not love, caressing is not his line; but he is a God of thunder, and he is a God of revenge.
"The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every sinner, and the sins of the fathers are often visited upon their remote posterity.
"Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities.