“Yea, as long as there he
    Birds in air, fish in sea,
      And blood in our veins;
    And the lions in might. 
    Leaping down from the height,
      Shake, roaring, their manes;
    And the dew nightly laves
    The forgotten old graves
      Where Judah’s sires sleep,—­
    We swear, who are living,
    To rest not in striving,
      To pause not to weep. 
    Let the trumpet be blown,
    Let the standard be flown,
      Now set we our watch. 
    Our watchword, ’The sword
    Of our land and our Lord’—­
      In Jordan NOW set we our watch.”

He sank upon the rude, wooden bench, exhausted, his eyes glittering, his raven hair dishevelled by the wildness of his gestures.  He had said.  For the rest of the evening he neither moved nor spake.  The calm, good-humored tones of Simon Gradkoski followed like a cold shower.

“We must be sensible,” he said, for he enjoyed the reputation of a shrewd conciliatory man of the world as well as of a pillar of orthodoxy.  “The great people will come to us, but not if we abuse them.  We must flatter them up and tell them they are the descendants of the Maccabees.  There is much political kudos to be got out of leading such a movement—­this, too, they will see.  Rome was not built in a day, and the Temple will not be rebuilt in a year.  Besides, we are not soldiers now.  We must recapture our land by brain, not sword.  Slow and sure and the blessing of God over all.”

After such wise Simon Gradkoski.  But Gronovitz, the Hebrew teacher, crypto-atheist and overt revolutionary, who read a Hebrew edition of the “Pickwick Papers” in synagogue on the Day of Atonement, was with Strelitski, and a bigot whose religion made his wife and children wretched was with the cautious Simon Gradkoski.  Froom Karlkammer followed, but his drift was uncertain.  He apparently looked forward to miraculous interpositions.  Still he approved of the movement from one point of view.  The more Jews lived in Jerusalem the more would be enabled to die there—­which was the aim of a good Jew’s life.  As for the Messiah, he would come assuredly—­in God’s good time.  Thus Karlkammer at enormous length with frequent intervals of unintelligibility and huge chunks of irrelevant quotation and much play of Cabalistic conceptions.  Pinchas, who had been fuming throughout this speech, for to him Karlkammer stood for the archetype of all donkeys, jumped up impatiently when Karlkammer paused for breath and denounced as an interruption that gentleman’s indignant continuance of his speech.  The sense of the meeting was with the poet and Karlkammer was silenced.  Pinchas was dithyrambic, sublime, with audacities which only genius can venture on.  He was pungently merry over Imber’s pretensions to be the National Poet of Israel, declaring that his prosody, his vocabulary, and even his grammar were beneath contempt.  He, Pinchas, would write Judaea a real Patriotic Poem, which should be sung