Naphtali Hartwig Wessely (born at Hamburg in 1725; died there in 1805)
is considered the prince of the poets of the time. Belonging to a rather
intelligent family in easy circumstances, he received a modern
education. Though his mind was open to all the new influences, he
nevertheless remained a loyal adherent of his faith, and occupied
strictly religious ground until the end. He devoted himself with success
to the cultivation of poetry, and completed the work of reform begun by
the Italian Luzzatto, to whom, however, he was inferior in depth and
originality.

Wessely's poetic masterpiece was _Shire Tiferet_ ("Songs of
Glory"), or the Epic of Moses (Berlin, 1789), in five volumes. This poem
of the Exodus is on the model of the pseudo-classic productions of the
Germany of his day; the influence of Klopstock's _Messias_, for
instance, is striking.

Depth of thought, feeling for art, and original poetic imagination are
lacking in _Shire Tiferet_. Practically it is nothing more than an
oratorical paraphrase of the Biblical recital. The shortcomings of his
main work are characteristic of all the poetry by Wessely. On the other
hand, his oratorical manner is unusually attractive, and his Hebrew is
elegant and chaste. The somewhat labored precision of his style, taken
together with the absence of the poetic temperament, makes of him the
Malherbe of modern Hebrew poetry. He enjoyed the love and admiration of
his contemporaries to an extraordinary degree, and his chief poem
underwent a large number of editions, becoming in course of time a
popular book, and regarded with kindly favor even by the most orthodox--
testimony at once to the poet's personal influence upon his co-
religionists and the growing importance of the Hebrew language.