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| A HOSPITAL for the poor and weary Jew, | |
| For sons of man that suffer three-fold ills; | |
| Burdened and baned with three infirmities; | |
| With poverty, disease, and Judaism! | |
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| The worst of all has ever been the last, | 5 |
| The Jewish sickness of the centuries, | |
| The plague caught in the Nile stream’s slimy vale, | |
| The old unwholesome faith that Egypt knew. | |
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| No healing for this sickness! All in vain | |
| The vapor-bath and douch, vain all the tricks | 10 |
| Of surgery, vain all this house may bring | |
| Of simples to its fever-tossing guests. | |
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| Will Time perchance, the eternal goddess, blot | |
| This gloomy sorrow that handed down | |
| From sire to son—will some far children know | 15 |
| The perfect happiness of cloudless health? | |
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| None can foretell! Yet meantime let us praise | |
| The heart that full of love and wisdom sought | |
| To trickle balm upon the rankling wound, | |
| To give what comfort still is possible. | 20 |
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| This loving man has built a shelter here | |
| For suffering that a skillful hand may soothe | |
| Or cure, or haply Death’s if others fail. | |
| Beds sets he here and cooling drinks and care. | |
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| A man of deeds, he did what one might do | 25 |
| And in the evening of his days he paid | |
| Unto good works the needful due, and dreamed | |
| To rest from labor in kind charity. | |
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| Unstinted was his hand—yet richer gifts | |
| Rolled down his cheeks so many a time—the tears, | 30 |
| The precious, generous tears that oft he wept | |
| For his poor brethren’s immedicable ill. | |
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