Even before the first blush of dawn, when every one in Russia was yet groaning under the strokes of an autocratic tyranny, which the presentiment of its speedy end had driven into madness, the bewitching strains of the new Hebrew lyre resounded through Lithuania.  They came from Micah Joseph Lebensohn, the son of “Adam” Lebensohn, author of high-flown Hebrew odes [1]—­a contemplative Jewish youth, suffering from tuberculosis and Weltschmerz.  He began his poetic career in 1840 by a Hebrew adaptation of the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid [2] but soon turned to Jewish motifs.  In the musical rhymes of the “Songs of the Daughter of Zion” (Shire bat Zion, Vilna, 1851), the author poured forth the anguish of his suffering soul, which was torn between faith and science, weighed down by the oppression from without and stirred to its depth by the tragedy of his homeless nation. [3] A cruel disease cut short the poet’s life in 1852, at the age of twenty-four.  A small collection of lyrical poems, published after his death under the title Kinnor bat Zion ("The Harp of the Daughter of Zion"), exhibited even more brilliantly the wealth of creative energy which was hidden in the soul of this prematurely cut-off youth, who on the brink of the grave sang so touchingly of love, beauty, and the pure joys of life.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 134 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  It was made from the German translation of Schiller]

[Footnote 3:  See the poems “Solomon and Koheleth,” “Jael and Sisera,” and “Judah ha-Levi.”]

A year after the death of our poet, in 1853, there appeared in the same capital of Lithuania the historic novel Ahabat Zion ("Love of Zion").  Its author, Abraham Mapu of Kovno (1808-1867), was a poor melammed who had by his own endeavors and without the help of a teacher raised himself to the level of a modern Hebrew pedagogue.  He lived in two worlds, in the valley of tears, such as the ghetto presented during the reign of Nicholas, and in the radiant recollections of the far-off biblical past.  The inspired dreamer, while strolling on the banks of the Niemen, among the hills which skirt the city of Kovno, was picturing to himself the luminous dawn of the Jewish nation.  He published these radiant descriptions of ancient Judaea in the dismal year of the “captured recruits.” [1] The youths of the ghetto, who had been poring over talmudic folios, fell eagerly upon this little book which breathed the perfumes of Sharon and Carmel.  They read it in secret—­to read a novel openly was not a safe thing in those days—­, and their hearts expanded with rapture over the enchanting idyls of the time of King Hezekiah, the portrayal of tumultuous Jerusalem and peaceful Beth-lehem.  They sighed over the fate of the lovers Amnon and Tamar, and in their flight of imagination were carried far away from painful reality.  The naive literary construction of the plot was of no consequence to the reader who tasted a novel for the first time in his life.  The naivete of the plot was in keeping with the naive, artificially reproduced language of the prophet Isaiah and the biblical annals, which intensified the illusion of antiquity.