Tears choked his utterance, and the old man wept,
His meagre frame convulsed with mighty sobs,—­
Pathetic tokens of a broken heart. 
His daughter crept beside him, drew his head,—­
Adorned with thin, white hair,—­upon her breast,
And soothed him as a mother might her child;
Then, when his grief abated, took his hands,—­
So worn and white,—­within her own soft palms,
And chafed them gently with a loving care;
Then pressed them to her lips, and lightly lay
Her warm cheek next his own, while murmuring words
Of tender, filial love in that old tongue
Which once had rung in triumph on this spot,
When poets of her race in glowing words
Had sung their glorious, prophetic strains.

“Father,” she whispered, “shall we now despair,
When we at last inhale the sacred air
Of our ancestral glory, and have come,
Despite long years of waiting, to our home? 
Didst thou not say, when far beyond the sea,
In our dark days of want and misery,
That thou hadst but one prayer,—­to go to die
Upon the hill where Zion’s ruins lie? 
Now this is granted, and thou hast attained
Thy dearest wish, with ample wealth retained
To keep us here from want, till on the breast
Of Olivet’s gray slope in death we rest.”

She paused, and faintly smiled, while at her voice
Her father turned his tear-dimmed eyes to hers,
As one who hears soft music with delight. 
The sunset glow fell full upon her face,—­
A rich, dark oval, crowned with raven hair;
Her lustrous eyes were shrines of tenderness,
Large, dark, profound, and tremulously bright,
And fringed by lashes of the deepest hue,
Which swept the downy smoothness of her cheek;
While her full lips, inimitably arched
And exquisitely mobile, told her thoughts,
Ere their soft motion framed them into speech;
Divinely there had Beauty set her seal;
As who should say,—­“Behold a perfect type
Of southern loveliness, in whose warm veins
The blood of good, ancestral stock runs pure,
Maintained through centuries of Spanish suns.” 
The old man fondly took her hands in his,
And, bending forward, kissed her broad, fair brow;
Then in a faint and weary voice replied;—­

“Rachel, my well-belov’d, I have in thee
The only blessing left on earth to me,
The one sweet solace in my dreary life
Of fourscore years of racial hate and strife;
Dear Comforter, ’tis true, our feet now stand
Within the limits of our people’s land;
Behind us are the obloquy and pain
Endured in cruel, persecuting Spain,
Yet feel I still more keenly here than there
The degradation which our people share;
Each object here speaks sadly to the Jew
Of all the grandeur which his race once knew. 
But let that pass; there is another pain
Which hurts me sorely, Rachel, and in vain
I seek a remedy; it is that thou
Hast now new lines of sorrow on thy brow. 
’Tis true, thou art a Jewess, and must know
The shame which constitutes thy people’s woe;
But I detect the signs of some new grief
For which the lapse of time brings no relief;
Thy cheek hath paled since our arrival here,
And often on its pallor gleams a tear.”