"O world! House of mourning, valley of weeping! Thy rivers are tears, and thy soil ashes. Upon thy surface thou bearest men that mourn, and in thy bowels the corpses of the dead…. From out of the mountains covered with snow and ice comes forth a chariot with none to guide. Within sits man and the wife of his bosom, beautiful as a flower, and at their knees play sweet children. Alas! a caravan of the dead simulating life! They journey on, and they go astray, and perish on the icy fields."
Distress round about, and all hopes collapsed, death hovers apart, yet near, remorseless, threatening, and in the end victorious.
In another poem, entitled "The Weeping Woman", his subject is pity again. He cries out:
"Thy enemy [cruelty] is stronger than thou. If thou art a burning fire, she is a current of icy water!… Alas for thee, O pity! Where is he that will have pity upon thee?"
With a few vigorous strokes, the Hebrew poet describes the nothingness of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the Renés is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living and its vexations. The disappointed son of the ghetto lays no stress on gratifications and pleasures. In the name of the supreme moral law he sets himself up for a pessimistic philosopher.
"Our life is a breath, light as a floating bark. The grave is at the very threshold of life, it awaits us not far from the womb of our mother….
"Since the beginnings of the earth, we have been here, and she changes us like the grass of her soil. She stands firm, unshaken. We alone are changeable, and help there is none for us, no refuge, nor may we decline to come hither. Like an angler of fish, the world brings us up on a hook. Before it has finished devouring one generation, the next is ready for its fate. One is swallowed up, the other snatched away. Whence cometh our help?"
To this general destruction, this wildness of the elements, which the "Mourner" fails to comprehend, permeated as he is with belief in Divine justice, is superadded the malice of man.
"And thou also, thou becomest a scourge unto thy brother! The heavenly host is joined by thy fellow-man. From the wrath of man, O man, thou wilt never escape. His jealousy of thee will last for aye, until thou art no more!"
And with all this, does life offer aught substantial, aught that is lasting?