11 tifllll ii': -.iln n ill ill n THG UNIYCRSITY Oe CALlfORNlfl LIBRARY ^'otwztfi <«* t^ nfiXW C^J^tl f^ ^^t&^eXL cScXlBRlS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/bardsofbibleOOgilfrich THE BARDS OF THE BIBLE. BY GEOEGE GILFILLAN. NEW YORK : HARPEU & BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET. 1851. p' § f PREFACE The succeeding work does not profess to be an elab- orate or full account of the mechanical structure of Hebrew poetry, nor a work of minute and verbal criti- cism. In order that the book may be tried by its own pretensions, the author deems it necessary to premise that, while containing much literary criticism, and a considerable proportion of biographical and religious matter, and while meant to develop indirectly a sub- sidiary argument for the truth and divinity of the Bible, its main ambition is to be a Prose Poem, or Hymn, in honor of the Poetry and Poets of the inspired volume, although, as the reader will perceive, he has occasion- ally diverged into the analysis of Scripture characters, and more rarely into cognate fields of literature or of speculation. It may, perhaps, be asked why he has not conform- ed to the common practice of printing his poetical quo- tations from Scripture, as poetry^ in their form of par- allelism. His answer is merely, that he never could bring himself to relish the practice, or to read with pleasure those translations of the Bible where it was used. Even favorite passages, in this guise, seemed new and cold to him. This, of course, was in some 3957€1 IV PREFACE. measure, he knew, the effect of associations ; but such associations, he knew also, were not confined to him. He may say this the more fearlessly, as translations of the great master-pieces of foreign literature into plain English prose are becoming the order of the day. He has also to explain, that two, or, at the most, three passages are here repeated from his *' Gralleries,'* for the reason, simply, that they at first belonged to a rough draft of the present work, which he began to draw out before his " First Gallery" appeared. They are now restored to their original position Dundee, November 14, 1850. CONTENTS. ■4 * » PAGS INTRODUCTION, . . ix CHAPTER I. CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING OLD TESTAMENT POETRr, . . ■ 23 CHAPTER 11. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY, . . 42 CHAPTER III. VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY, . . . . , 68 CHAPTER ly. POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH, . . . . , 69 CHAPTER V. POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB, , 76 CHAPTER YI. POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS, ..... 96 CHAPTER YII. tOETRT OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS, 114 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER VIII. SOLOMON AND HIS POETRY, PAGE 130 CHAPTER IX. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETIC BOOKS, 145 ISAIAH, JEREMIAH, EZEKIEL, DANIEL, CHAPTER X. 160 154 159 166 JONAH, AMOS, HOSEA, JOEL, MIGAH, NAHUM, ZEPHANIAH HABAKKUK OBADIAH, HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH MALACHI, . CHAPTER XL THE MINOR PROPHETS 173 181 186 189 194 199 200 203 207 209 211 214 CHAPTER XII. CIRCUMSTANCES MODIFYING NEW TESTAMENT POETRY, 217 CHAPTER Xm. POETRY OF THE GOSPELS, .... 242 CONTENTS. VU CHAPTER XIV. PAGE PAUL, ' 247 CHAPTER XV. PETER AND JAMES, *] 270 CHAPTER XVI. JOHN, 280 CHAPTER XVII. COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE, INFLUENCES, AND EFFECTS OF SCRIP- TURE POETRY, • . 296 CONCLUSION. FUTURE DESTINY OF THE BIBLE, . . . . . 328 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. THE POETICAL CHARACTERS IN SCRIPTURE, . • . 352 INTRODUCTION. That so much of Scripture should be written in the language of poetry, has excited some surprise, and cre- ated some inquiry ; and yet in nothing do we perceive more clearly than in this, the genuineness, power, and divinity of the oracles of our faith. As the lan- guage of poetry is that into which all earnest natures are insensibly betrayed, so it is the only speech which has in it the power of permanent impression. As it gives two ideas in the space of one, so it writes these before the view, as with the luminousness of fire. The language of the imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect — of his aroused passions — of his devotion — of all the higher moods and temperaments of his mind. It was meet, therefore, that it should be the language of his revelation from G-od. It was meet that, when man was called into the presence of his Maker, he should not be addressed with cold formality, nor in words of lead, nor yet in the harsh thunder of peremptory com- mand and warning, but that he should hear the same figured and glowing speech, to which he was accus- tomed, flowing in mellower and more majestic accents from the lips of his G-od. INTRODUCTION. The language of poetry has, therefore, become the language of the inspired volume. The Bible is a mass of beautiful figures — its words and its thoughts are alike poetical — it has gathered around its central truths all natural beauty and interest — it is a temple, with one altar and one God, but illuminated by a thousand varied lights, and studded with a thousand ornaments. It has substantially but one declaration to make, but it utters it in the voices of the creation. Shining forth from the excellent glory, its light has been reflected on a myriad intervening objects, till it has been at length attempered for our earthly vision. It now beams upon us at once from the heart of man and from the countenance of nature. It has arrayed itself in the charms of fiction. It has gathered new beauty from the works of creation, and new warmth and new power from the very passions of clay. It has pressed into its service the animals of the forest, the flowers of the field, the stars of heaven, all the ele- ments of nature. The lion spurning the sands of the desert, the wild roe leaping over the mountains, the lamb led in silence to the slaughter, the goat speeding to the wilderness, the rose blossoming in Sharon, the lily drooping in the valley, the apple-tree bowing under its fruit, the great rock shadowing a weary land, the river gladdening the dry place, the moon and the morning star, Carmel by the sea, and Tabor among the moun- tains, the dew from the womb of the morning, the rain upon the mown grass, the rainbow encompassing the landscape, the light God's shadow, the thunder His voice, the wind and the earthquake His footsteps — all such varied objects are made as if naturally de- signed from their creation to represent Him to whom INTRODUCTION. XI the Book and all its emblems point. Thus the quick spirit of the Book has ransacked creation to lay its treasures on Jehovah's altar — united the innumerable rays of a far-streaming glory on the little hill, Calvary — and woven a garland for the bleeding brow of Im- manuel, the flowers of which have been culled from the gardens of a universe. This praise may seem lofty, but it is due to the Bible, and to it alone — because it only, of all poems, has uttered in broken fullness, in finished fragments, that shape of the universal truth which instantly in- carnates itself in living nature — fills it as a hand a glove — impregnates it as a thought a word — peoples it as a form a mirror. The truth the Bible teaches is not indeed the absolute, abstract, entire truth ; but it is (in our judgment, and as it shall yet be more fully understood) the most clear, succinct, consistent, broad, and practical representation of the truth which has ever fallen, or which in this world ever shall fall, upon the fantastic mirror of the human heart, or of nature, and which from both has compelled the most faithful and enduring image. It does not occupy the whole compass of the sky of the infinite from which it pro- ceeds ; it does not waylay all future, any more than all past emanations from that region ; but it covers, and commands as a whole, that disk of the finite over which it bends. It is, as thp amplest, clearest, and highest word ever spoken to man, entitled to command our belief, as well as, through the fire and the natural graces of the utterance, to excite our admiration, and comes over the world and man, not as a suppliant, but as a sovereign — not the timid^ but (in the old sense) Xll INTRODUCTION. the tyrannous ruler of our earthly night, '^ until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts." "Without entering into the vexed and vexatious question of verbal inspiration — without seeking mi- nutely to analyze that abysmal word — inspiration — or to examine the details of a controversy which is little more than begun — we would, as a proper preliminary to our future remarks, thus express more explicitly, though shortly, our general belief as to what the Bible is, and what is its relative position to men and to other works. The Bible is not then, to commence with negatives, a scientific book ; its intention is not to teach geology or astronomy, any more than meteorology or conchol- ogy ; its allusions to the subjects of science are inci- dental, brief, glancing for a moment to a passing topic, and then rapidly returning to its main and master theme. Not only so, but its statements seem often to coincide with floating popular notions, as well as to clothe themselves in popular language, while they never fail, through their wonted divine alchymy, to deduce from them lessons of moral truth and wisdom. It is not a full but a fragmentary record even of that part of man's history to which it confines itself. It is not a moral or metaphysical treatise ; and, of logical analysis or deduction, it has (save in Paul's Epistles) little or none. The most religious, it is the least theological of books, so far as theology means a con- scious, compact, distinctly enounced, and elaborately defended system. An artistic work it can scarcely be called, so slight is the artifice of its language and INTRODUCTION. XlU rKytlimical construction. It is rude in speecli, though, not in knowledge. What then is the Bible ? It is, as a history, the narrative of a multitude of miraculous facts, which skepticism has often challenged, but never disproved, and which, to say the least, must now re- main unsolved phenomena— the aerolites of history — speaking like those from the sky of an unearthly re- gion — the narrative, too, of a life (that of Jesus) at once ideally perfect, and trembling all over with hu- manity, really spent under this sun, and yet lit along its every step and suffering by a light above it — a life which has since become the measure of all other lives, the standard of human and of absolute perfection — the ideal at once ofma7i atid of God. As a poem — moral and didactic — it is a repertory of divine instincts — a collection of the deepest intuitions of truth, beauty, justice, holiness — the past, the present, the future — which, by their far vision, the power with wliich they have stamped themselves on the belief and heart, the hopes and fears, the days and nights of humanity, their superiority to aught else in the thoughts or words of man, their consistency with themselves, their adap- tation to general needs, their cheering influence, their progressive development, and their close-drawn con- nection with those marvelous and unshaken facts — are proved divine in a sense altogether peculiar and alone. In its relation to man, the Bible therefore stands thus : — It is the authority for the main principle of his belief ; it is the manual of the leading rites and prac- tices of his worship ; as the manifold echo of the voice of his conscience, it constitutes the grand standard of XIV INTRODUCTION. his morality; it is his fullest and most authentic mis- sive from his Maker ; it is his sole torch into the darkness of the unseen world ; all his science, his art, and his philosophy, it aims at, and, at last (in the course of its own development, for it is ''a fire unfold- ing itself"), shall succeed in drawing into harmony with its principles ; and of his poetry, it is the loftiest reach. Thus, it is designed at once to command and to charm, to subdue and to sublimate, the mind of man ; to command his belief into obedience — to charm his heart and his imagination — to subdue his moral nature — and to sublimate the springs of his hope and joy ; predestined, too, to move along with his progress, but to move as did the fiery pillar with the armies of Israel, above and before him — his guide as well as companion, directing his motions, while attending his march. Its power over man has, need we say ? been obstinately and long resisted — but resisted in vain. For ages, has this artless, loosely-piled, little book been exposed to the fire of the keenest investigation — a fire which meanwhile has consumed contemptuously the mythology of the Iliad, the husbandry of the Greorgics, the historical truth of Livy, the fables of the Shaster, the Talmud, and the Koran, the artistic merit of many a popular poem, the authority of many a work of phi- losophy and science. And yet, there the Bible lies, unhurt, untouched, with not one of its pages singed— with not even the smell of fire having passed upon it. Many an attempt has been made to scare away this *' Fiery Pillar" of our wanderings, or to prove it a mere natural product of the wilderness ; but still, night after night, rises — like one of the sure and ever- shining stars — in the vanguard of the great march of INTRODUCTION. XV man, the old column, gliding slow, but guiding cer- tainly to future lands of promise, both in the life that is, and in that which cometh hereafter. In relation to other books, the Bible occupies a pe- culiar and solitary position. It is independent of all others ; it imitates no other book ; it copies none ; it hardly alludes to any other, whether in praise or blame ; and this is nearly as true of its later portions, when books were common, as of its earlier, when books were scarce. It proves thus its originality and power. Mont Blanc does not measure himself with Jura ; does not name her, nor speak, save when in thunder he talks to her of Grod. Then only, too, does she " Answer from her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps." John never speaks of Plato, nor Paul of Demosthenes, nor Jesus of any writer, save Moses and the Prophets. In those great heights, you feel blowing round your temples, and stirring your hair, the free, original, an- cient Breath of the upper world, unconventional, un- mixed, and irresistible, as the mountain tempest. It is a book unlike all others — the points of difference being these, among many more : — First, There is a certain grand unconsciousness, as in Niagara, speak- ing now in the same tone to the tourists of a world, as when she spoke to the empty wilderness and the silent sun ; as in the Himalayan Hills, which cast the same look of still sovereignty over an India unpeopled after the Deluge, as over an India the hive of swelter- ing nations. Thus burst forth, cries of nature — the XVI INTRODUCTION. voices of the Prophets ; and thus do their eyes, from the high places of the world, overlook all the earth. You are aware, again, in singular union with this pro- found unconsciousness and simplicity, of a knowledge and insight equally profound. It is as though a child should pause amid her play, and tell you the secrets of your heart, and the particulars of your after history. The bush beside your path suddenly begins to sigh forth an oracle, in " words unutterable." That un- conscious page seems, like the wheel .in Ezekiel's vision, to be "full of eyes;" and, open it wherever you may, you start back in surprise or terror, feeling " this book knows all about us ; it eyes us meaningly ; it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of our hearts." Those herdsmen, vinedressers, shepherds, fishermen, and homeless wanderers, are coeval with all time, and see the end from the beginning. You perceive, again, the presence of a high and holy pur- pose pervading the Book, which is to trace and pro- mulgate the existence of certain spiritual laws, origin- ally communicated by Grod, developed in the history of a peculiar people, illustrated by the ruin of nations, proclaimed in a system of national religion and na- tional poetry, and at last sealed', cemented, and spread abroad through the blood and Gospel of One who had always been expected, and who at last arrived — the Christ promised to the Fathers. It is this which renders the Bible, in all its parts, religious and holy ; casts over its barest portions such an interest as the shadow of the fiiery Pillar gave to the sand and shrubs over which it passed — makes what otherwise appear trifles, great as trappings of Godhead — and extracts from fiction and fable, from the crimes of the evil and INTRODUCTION. XVll the failings of the good, aid to its main object, and illustration of its main principles. You find yourself again in the presence of a '^ true thing." We hear of the spell of fiction, but a far stronger spell is that of truth ; indeed, fiction derives its magic from the quan- tity of truth it contrives to disguise. In this book, you find truth occasionally, indeed, concealed under the garb of allegory and fable, but frequently in a form as naked and majestic as Adam when he rose from the greensward of Eden. *' This is true," we exclaim, *' were all else a lie. Here, we have found men, ear- nest as the stars, speaking to us in language which, by its very heat, impetuosity, unworldliness, fearless- ness, almost if not altogether imprudence, severity, and grandeur, proves itself sincere, if there be sin- cerity in earth or in heaven." Once more, the Bible, you feel, answers a question which other books can not. This — the question of questions, the question of all ages — is, in our vernacular and expressive speech, '' What shall I do to be saved r ^' How shall I be peaceful, resigned, holy, and hopeful here, and how happy hereafter, when this cold cloak — the body — has fallen off from the bounding soul within." To this, the '' Iliad" of Homer, the Plays of Shakspeare, the *' Celeste Mechanique" of La Place, and the Works of Plato, return no proper reply. To this immense query, the Book has given an answer, which may theoretically have been interpreted in various ways, but which, as a practical truth, he who runs may read ; which has satisfied the souls of millions; which none ever repented of obeying ; and on which many of the wisest, the most learned, the most slow of heart to believe, as well as the ignorant and simple-minded. XVlll INTRODUCTIOIf. have at last been content to lean their living confi- dence and their dying peace. I ' The Book, we thus are justified in proclaiming to be superior to all other books that have been, or are, or shall ever be on earth. And this, not that it fore- stalls coming books, or includes all their essential truth within it; nor that, in polish, art, or instant effect, it can be exalted above the written master-pieces of human genius ; — what comparison in elaboration, any more than what comparison in girth and great- ness, between the cabinet and the oak ; but it is, that the Bible, while bearing on its summit the hues of a higher heaven, overtopping with ease all human struc- tures and aspirations — in earth, but not of it — com- municating with the omniscience, and recording the acts of the omnipotence, of Grod — is at the same time the Bible of the poor and lowly, the crutch of the aged, the pillow of the widow, the eye of the blind, the " boy's own book," the solace of the sick, the light of the dying, the grand hope and refuge of simple, sincere, and sorrowing spirits ; — it is tlds which at once proclaims its unearthly origin, and so clasps it to the great common heart of humanity, that the extinction of the sun were not more mourned than the extinction of the Bible, or than even its receding from its present pride of place. For, while other books are planets shining with reflected radiance, this book, like the sun, shines with ancient and unborrowed ray. Other books have, to their loftiest altitudes, sprung from earth ; this book looks down from heaven high. Other books appeal to understanding or fancy ; this book to conscience and to faith. Other books seek our atten- INTRODUCTION. XlX tion ; tliis book demands it — it speaks with authority, and not as the Scribes. Other books gUde gracefully along the earth, or onward to the mountain-summits of the ideal ; this, and this alone, conducts up the awful abyss which leads to heaven. Other books, after shining their little season, may perish in flames, fiercer than those which destroyed the Alexandrian Library ; this must, in essence, remain pure as gold, but unconsumable as asbestos, in the general confla- gration. Other books may be forgotten in a universe where suns go down and disappear, like bubbles in the stream ; the memory of this book shall shine as the brightness of that eternal firmament, and as those higher stars, which are forever and ever. It is of the Bible, not as a revelation of special^ but as a poem embodying general truth, that we propose in the following work to speak. Our purpose is not to expound its theological tenets, nor its ritual worship (except so far as these modify the imaginative tenden- cies and language of the writers), but to exhibit, in some degree, the beauty of the poetic utterance which the writers have given to their views and feelings. To this task we proceed, not merely at the instance of individuals whom we are proud to call friends, but be- cause we feel that it has not been as yet accomplished adequately, or in accommodation to the spirit of the age. Every criticism on a true poem should be it- self a poem. "We have many excellent, elaborate, and learned criticisms upon the Poetry of the Bible ; but the fragmentary essay of Herder alone seems to ap- proach to the idea of a prose poem on the subject. A new and fuller eflbrt seems to be demanded. Writers, XX INTRODUCTION. too, far more adapted for the work than we, have di- verged from it in various directions. Some have laud- ably devoted themselves to building up anew, and in a more masterly style, the evidences of the authenti- city and truth of Scripture ; others are employed in re- butting the startling objections to the Bible which have arrived from across the Grerman Ocean. Many are redarguing the whole questions of supernatural inspiration and the Scripture canon from their founda- tions ; some are disposed to treat Bible poetry as some- thing above literary criticism ; and others as some- thing beneath it. The majority seem, in search of mistakes, or in search of mysteries, to have forgotten that the Bible is a poem at all. We propose therefore to take up this neglected theme — the Bards of the -Bible ; and in seeking to de- velop their matchless merit as masters of the lyre — to develop, at the same time, indirectly, a subordinate though strong evidence that they are something more — the rightful rulers of the belief and the heart of man. Perhaps this subject may not be found alto- gether unsuited to the wants of the age. If properly treated, it may induce some to pause before they seek any longer to pull in vain at the roots of a thing so beautiful. It may teach others to prize that Book somewhat more for its literature, which they have all along loved for its truth, its holiness, and its adap- tation to their nature. It may strengthen some falter- ing convictions, and tend to withdraw enthusiasts from the exclusive study of imperfect modern and morbid models to those great ancient masters. It may, possibly, through the lesson of infinite beauty, INTRODUCTION. XXX successfully insinuate that of eternal truth into some souls hitherto shut against one or both ; and as thou- sands have been led to regard the Bible as a book of genius, from having first thought it a book of God, so in thousands may the process be inverted ! It will, in any case, repay, in a certain measure, our debt to that divine volume, which, from early childhood, has hardly ceased for a day to be our companion — which has colored our imagination, commanded our belief, impressed our thought, and steeped our language — which, so familiarized to us by long intimacy, has be- come rather a friend than a fiery revelation — to the proclamation of which, as containing a G-ospel of Peace, we have devoted the most valued of our years — and to the illustration of which, as a word of un- equaled genius, we now devote those pages, commend- ing them to the Great Spirit of the Book. THE BARDS OF THE BIBLE. CHAPTER I. CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. The admitted principle that every poet is partly the creator and partly tlie creature of circumstances, applies to the Hebrew Bards, as to others. But it is also true that the great poet is more the creator than the creature of his age, and of its influ- ences. And this must with peculiar force apply to those for whom we claim a certain supernatural inspiration, connected with their poetic afflatus, in some such mysterious way as the soul is connected, though not identified, with the electric fluid in the nerves and brain. What such writers give must be in- comparably more than what they get from their country or their period. Still it is a very important inquiry, what events in Old Testament history, or what influences from peculiar doc- trines, from Oriental scenery, or from the structure of the He- brew language and verse, have tended to awaken or modify their strains, and to bring into play those occasional causes which have lent them their mystic and divine power ? This is the subject of the present chapter, and we may further premise, that whenever even poetic inspiration is genuine, it never de- tracts from its merit to record the occasions which gave it birth, the sparks of national or individual feeling from which it ex- ploded, or the influence of other minds in lighting its flame, 24 CIRCUMSTANCES CRLATING AND MODIFYINa and can much less when it is the " authentic fire" of heaven, of which we speak. The first circumstance we mention, is no less than the crea- tion itself, as it appeared to the Jewish mind. The austere simphcity of that remarkable verse of Genesis, "In the begin- ning God created the heavens and the earth," sounds a fitting keynote to the entire volume. Never shall we forget the emo- tion with which we read those words for the first time in the original tongue. The words themselves, perhaps the earliest ever written — their information so momentous — the scene to which, in their rugged simplicity, they hurried us away, gave them a profound and almost awful interest ; and we sat silent and motionless, as under the response of an oracle on which out destiny depended. Longinus has magnified the poetry of the divine exclamation, " Let there be light, and there was light ;" but on our feelings the previous statement had a greater eflfect, throwing us back into the gulf of ages, and giving us a dim retrospect of gigantic cycles rolling forward in silence. The his- tory of the creation indeed is all instinct with poetry. As includ- ing an account of the preparations for the reception of man, how beautifully does it evolve. How, like a drama, where the interest deepens toward the conclusion, does it, step by step, awaken and increase our attention and curiosity. First, the formless deep arises — naught seen but undefined and heaving waters, and naught heard but above the surge the broodings of the Eternal Spirit. Then light flashes forth, like some element already existing in all things, though vailed, so instantaneous in its appearance. Then, the firmament arises, dividing the waters from the waters. Then, heaving up from its overhanging seas, the dry land shows its dark earthy substance, to bear the feet of man. Then in the sky, globes, collecting and condensing the scattered light, shine forth to number the years and direct the steps of man. Then the waters, under the genial warmth, begin to teem with life, and the earth to produce its huge offspring, and to send up, as " in dance," its stately and fruit-bearing trees, to feed the appe- tite and relieve the sohtude of man. And then, the preparations OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 25 for his coming being complete, lie appears. The stage having been swept, and garnished, and lighted up, the great actor steps forward. " And on the sixth day God said, let us make man in our own image." How magnificent these preparations ! how fine their gradations ! and how deep and mystical the antithesis between the scale on which they had been conducted and the result in which they had issued, in the appearance, amid all that vast and costly theatre, of a child of clay. And how does the contrast swell, instead of narrowing, when we believe, with the geologists, that innumerable centuries had in these prepara- tions been expended ! The impulse given to the imagination of the Jews, through their conceptions of the creation, was great, and the allusions of their poets to it afterward are nume- rous, Solomon, for instance, in his personification of Wisdom, describes it in language lofty as that of Moses. " When he ap- pointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by him, as one brought up with him." Job abounds in reference to this cardi- nal truth. Isaiah, speaking in the person of God, and throwing down a gantlet to all the heathen deities, says, " I have made the earth, and created man upon it. I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens." Thus does this primal truth or fact of Scripture flash down light and glory over all its pages, and the book may be said to stand in the brightness of its opening verse. Another event teeming with poetry, and which had no small effect on the Jewish imagination, was the flood. The tradition of a flood is found in all nations, but often in company with ludicrous images and circumstances which mar its sublimity. It is described by Moses with even more than his usual bareness, and almost sterile simplicity. His language scarcely ever rises, save when he speaks of the " windows of heaven being opened," above the level of prose; not another figure in the narrative confesses his emotion at the sight of deluge enwrapping the globe — the yell of millions of drowning and desperate men and animals contending with the surge of the sea — the mountains of earth overtopped by the aspiring waters — the sun retiring from the sight, as if in grief and forever — ^and, amid all this B 26 CIRCUMSTAITCES CREATING AND MODIFYING assemblage of terrors, the one vessel rising majestic and alone, through whose windows look forth Seth's children, their eyes dimmed and darkened with tears. And yet the bare truth of the flood, sown in the hearts of the Hebrews, became a seed of poetry. The flood put a circle of lurid glory round the head of their God ; it awed the patriarchs in their midnight tents — it gave a new charm and beauty to the " rainbow which encora- passeth the heavens with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it." It brought out all the possible grandeur of the element of water. Frequent are the allusions to it in after days. "The Lord," says David, "sittoth upon the fl.oods," alluding not altogether to the swellings of Jordan, nor to the sweUings, seen from Carmel, of the Mediterranean, but to that ocean without a shore, on which his eye saw the Jehovah seated, his wings the winds, his voice the thunder of the sea-billows, his feet feathered with lightnings, and his head lost in the immen- sity of o'er-canopying gloom. Again, saith Isaiah, in the name of the Almighty, "this is as the waters of Noah unto me, for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah shall go no more over the earth, so have I sworn not to be wroth with thee." And, besides other allusions, we find Peter speaking of God bringing in a " flood upon the world of the ungodly." Thus do the " waters of Noah" send down a far deep voice, which is poetry, into the depths of futurity ; and there is no topic, even yet, which, if handled with genius, is so sure to awaken interest and emotion. Passing over the events connected with the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of the human race — the histories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the romantic story of Joseph and his brethren — the wondrous phenomena attending the departure of Israel from Egypt, we pause at Sinai, the center of the ancient system. There was enacted a scene fitted to produce, in the first instance, an alarm and awe inconsistent with the •sublime, but ultimately to create of itself a volcanic stream of national imagination, rising from the roots of the savage hill. Sinai, bare, dark, craggy, in itself, surrounded suddenly by a mantle of gloom, and crowned above all other hills with a dia- OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 2T dem of fire — a fierce wind blowing in restless eddies aroimd it — torrents of rain descending through the darkness — the light- nings of God playing upon the summit — thunders crashing in- cessantly — the trumj) which shall call the dead to judgment, sending forth a preliminary note, and causing the mountain to thrill and tremble — and heard at intervals, above all, the very voice of the Eternal — the millions of Israel standing silent on the plain, awe and wonder casting a shadow over their faces — and, amid all this, one lonely man going up the hill, and quak- ing as he goes — the utterance of the fiery law from amid the gloom — the Amen of the tribes — the seclusion of Moses wdth Jehovah, for forty days, on the top of the mount — the finger of God, the same finger which, dipping itself in glory, had touched the firmament, and left as its trace the sun, writing the ten pre- cepts on the two tables — the passing (*f the Lord before Moses, as he hasted and threw himself on the ground — the descent of the favored man, with his face shining out the tidings where he had been — all this taken together, while calculated to cast a salutary terror down to remote ages, and to make the children, among the willows of Canaan, to tremble at the name of Sinai, was fitted, too, to produce a peculiar and terrible poetry. We find, accordingly, the shadow of Horeb communicating influence to almost all the Hebrew prophets. It was unquestionably in David's eye, wdien he sung that highest of his strains, the 18th Psalm, which has carried our common metrical versions of it to unwonted pitches of power : — " On cherub and on cherubim Full royally he rode, And on the wings of mighty winds Came flying all abroad," It was in Daniel's view, when he described the fiery stream going before the Ancient of Days. The prayer of Habakkuk is a description of the same scene. " God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. 28 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING wlien turning his back on the mount that might be touched, seems to linger in admiration of its grandeur, and his descrip- tion of it is full of jDoetrj. It is hardly too much to say that the genius of the race was kindled at the fires of Sinai. AVe mention, as another powerful stimulus to the imagina- tion of the Jews, the peculiar economy of that peculiar people. This, what with the thunders amid which it was cradled — the meteors which, as a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, guided and guarded it — the miracles which, like a supernatural circle, hedged it in — the mysteries of its tabernacle — the un- earthly brightness of that Shechinah which filled its holy of holies — the oracular luster shining around its priests — the pomp, the solemnity, and the minuteness of its sacrifices — the wailing cadences, the brisker measures, blended wdth the awful bursts of its minstrelsy — the temple, with its marble and gold, its pin- nacles turned, like the fingers of suppliant hands, to heaven — its molten sea, and bulls of brass — its "carved angels, ever eager-eyed," shapes of celestial sculpture — its mercy-seat, so overshadowed, so inviolable, so darkened, amid its glories, by a penumbra of divine anger — the atmosphere of holiness suf- fused, like strange sunshine, over every bell and breastplate, candlestick and cherub — the typical character which filled even the solitudes of the place with meaning, and shook them with silent eloquence — the feeling of expectancy and the air of pro- phecy which reigned over the whole — all this exerted an influ- ence over the imagination as well as the faith, and cast a more than mortal poetry around a system of ceremonies so unique and profound. Hence the merest details, in Leviticus and Exodus, of these rites, become instinct with imagination, and need neither verse nor figure to add to their naked greatness. Among the doctrines peculiar to the Jews, and inspiring their genius, we may enumerate the unity of the divine nature, their idea of the divine omnipresence, their expectation of a Messiah, their doctrine of a millennium, and their views of a future state. The doctrine of divine unity, by collecting all the scattered rays of beauty and excellence, from every quarter of OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 29 the universe, and coiicleiising them into one overpowering con- ception, by tracing the innumerable rills of thought and feeling to the fountain of an infinite mind, surpasses the most elegant and ethereal polytheism immeasurably more than the sun does the " cinders of the element." However beautiful the mythology of Greece, as interpreted by Wordsworth — however instinct it was with imagination — although it seemed to breathe a super- natural soul into the creation, to rouse and startle it all into life, to fill the throne of the sun with a divine sovereign, to hide a JSTaiad in every fountain, to crown every rock with an Oread, to deify shadows and storms, and to send sweeping across the waste of ocean a celestial emperor — ^it must yield without a struggle to the thought of a great One Spirit, feeding by his perpetual presence the lamp of the universe, speaking in all its voices, lis- tening in all its silence, storming in its rage, reposing in its calm, its light-the shadow of his greatness, its gloom the hiding-place of his power, its verdure the trace of his steps, its fire the breath of his nostrils, its motion the circulation of his untiring energies, its warmth the effluence of his love, its mountains the altars of his worship, and its oceans the mirrors where he beholds his form, " glassed in tempests." Compared to those conceptions, how does the fine dream of the Pagan Mythus melt away — Olympus, with its multitude of stately celestial natures, dwindle before the solitary immutable throne of Jehovah — the poetry as well as the philosophy of Greece shrink before the single sentence, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord" — and Wordsworth's description of the origin of its multitudinous gods Igoks tame beside the mighty lines of Milton — "The oracles are dumb, N"o voice or hideous hum, Runs tlirough the arched roof, in words deceiving. Apollo, from his shrine, Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 'No nightly trance, or breathed spell. Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 30 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING He feels from Judah's land, The dreadful Infant's hand. The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn. Nor all the gods beside, Longer dare abide, Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky t^vine. Our Babe, to show his Godhead true. Can, in his swaddling bands, control the damned crew.'* Closely connected with tliis doctrine of divine unity, is that of divine omnipresence. To the Hebrews, the external universe is just a bright or black screen concealing God. All things are full of, yet all distinct from, him. That cloud on the mountain is his covering ; that muttering from the chambers of the thunder is his voice ; that sound on the top of the mulberry-trees is his " going ;" in that wind, which bends the forest or curls the clouds, he is walking ; that sun is his still commanding eye — Whither can they go from his Spirit ? whither can they flee from his presence ? At every step, and in every circumstance, they feel themselves God-inclosed, God-filled, God-breathing men, with a spiritual presence lowering or smiling on them from the sky, sounding in wild tempest, or creeping in panic stillness across the surface of the earth ; and if they turn within, lo ! it is there also — an " Eye" hung in the central darkness of their own hearts. Hence the muse of the Hebrew bard is not Dame Memory, nor any of her syren daughters, but the almighty, all-pervading Spirit himself, who is at once the subject, the auditor, and the inspirer of the song. What heart, in what age or country, has not, at some time or other, throbbed in the expectation of a Messiah, a " Coming One," destined to right the wrongs, stanch the wounds, explain the mystery, and satisfy the ideal, of this wondrous, weary, hapless, and " unintelligible" world — who shall reconcile it to itself, by giving it a purer model of life, and a nobler principle of action — who shall form a living link, wedding it to the high and distant heaven — who shall restore the skies, the roses, and the hearts of Eden, and instruct us, by his plan of reconcilia- OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 31 tion, that the fall itself was a stage in the triumph of man ? Hu- manity has not only desired, but has cried aloud for his coming. The finest minds of the Pagan world hav^e expressed a hope, as well as a love of his appearing ; it might indeed be proved that this " Desire of all Nations" lies at the foundation of all human hope, and is the preserving salt of the world. From earth to heaven, the question was for ages reverberated, " Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof V And for ages, all earnest men wept much because the volume remained shut. But in the minds of the Jews, this feeling dwelt with peculiar intensity and concentration. It rendered every birth a possible epoch ; it hung a spell over every cradle. The Desire of all Nations was, in a profound sense, the desire of Jewish females. From the heart, it passed naturally into the imagination, and from thence into the poetry of the land, which is rarely so sub- hme as when picturing tlie character and achievements of the Desired and Expected One. This desire, in what singular circumstances was it fulfilled ! The earth was at rest and still. The expectation of many ages had come to its height. In the hush of that universal silence, w^e may imagine the hearts of all nations panting audibly, with strong and intolerable longing. And when the expectation was thus at the fullest, its object ar- rived. And where did the Desire of all Nations appear ? Did he lift up his head in the palaces of Rome, or the porticoes of Athens ? No ; but he came where the desire was beating most strongly — to the core of the great heart which was panting for him — to the village of Bethlehem, in the midst of Judea, and the neighborhood of Jerusalem. And how came he ? Was it in fire and glory, robed in a mantle of tempest, and with em- broideries of lightning ? No ; but as a weeping babe ! " To us a child''' was given. And all who liad entered into the g\enuine spirit of the ancient poetic announcements, felt this to be " very good." The doctrine of a millennium must surely have been a pure emanation from Heaven. As a mere dream, we could conceive it crossing the brain of a visionary, or quickening the eager pen 32 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING of a poet as lie wrote it down. But, as a distinct, prominent, and fixed prospect, in the onward view of the philanthropist — as any thing more than a castle in the clouds — it seems to have been let down, like Jacob's ladder, from a higher region. Even granting that it was only a tradition which inspired Virgil's Pollio, it was probably a tradition which had floated from above. To the same region we may trace the allusions to a millen- nium, which may be found, more or less distinctly, in the many mythologies of the world. But in Scripture alone do we find this doctrine inwrought with the whole system, per- vading all its books, and, while thoroughly severed, on the one hand, from absurdity and mysticism, expressed, on the other, in a profusion of figure, and painted in the softest and richest colors. Did the idea of a happy world, whether communi- cated to the soul of Virgil by current tradition, or caught from the hps of some wandering Jew, or formed by the mere projec- tion of the favorite thought of a golden age upon the canvas of the future, raise him for a time above himself, and inspire one strain matchless among Pagan poets ? What a provision, then, must have been made for the production of a world of poetry, from the thick gleams and glimpses of distant glory, scattered over the pages of all the bards of Israel ! How sublime the con- ception, in its own original fountains, reposing under the tree of life, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations ! and especially as we find it flaming around the lips of the prophets of God, who, seeing in the distance the wolf dwelling with the lambj and the leopard with the kid ; the mountain of the Lord's house exalted above the mountains and established above the hills ; the New Jerusalem coming down from God, as a bride adorned for her husband ; earth uplifted from the neighborhood of hell to that of heaven ; the smoke of its every cottage rising like the smoke of an altar ; peace brooding on its oceans ; righteousness running in its streams ; and the very bells of its horses, bearing " Hohness to the Lord" — leaped up exult- ing at the sight, and sent forward, from their watch-towers, a far cry of recognition and enthusiasm, " Arise, shine ; for thy OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. S3 light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee." " Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows ?" " The sun shall be' no more thy light by day ; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw it- self, for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended." Who, but writers in the highest sense inspired, could often assume, or long sustain, such strains as these? Who, but they, could keep so steadily separate from the deep clouds of the present a prospect so distinct and sublime ? Who, uninfluenced by the Spirit of the Lord, would have dared, not merely as a poetic conception, but as a pro- phetical announcement, to predict what all history and all ex- perience would seem to stamp with the wildest pnnt of LTtopia ? "Few, few have striven to make earth heaven," but as few% un- enlightened from on high, have ever long grasped or detained the brilliant possibility. It seems, at least, the last refinement of philosophical conjecture. And yet, in the Hebrew prophets, we find it closing every vista, irradiating every gloom, lying, like a bright western heaven, at the termination of every pro- phetic day ; coloring the gorgeous page of Isaiah ; gleaming through the willows where Jeremiah had hung his harp ; glaring on the wild eye of Ezekiel, who turns from his wheels, " so high that they were dreadful," to show the waters of the sanctuary becoming an immeasurable and universal stream ; mingling with the stern denunciations of Micah \ tinging with golden edges the dreams of Daniel ; and casting transient rays of transcendent beauty amid the obscure .and troubled tragedy of the Apocalypse. With respect to a future state, the conceptions of the heathens were not only imperfect and false, but gross and coarse. In that dreary Tartarus, there were indeed many statuesque forms and noble faces marked out from amid the general haze, and visible in the leaden light. There was poetry in the despairing thirst of Tantalus ; poetry in the eternal stone, wet with the eternal sweat of Sisyphus ; poetry in the daughters of Danaus filhng up 34 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING the same everlasting sieve ; poetry in that grim figure of Ajax, silent in the shades, and also in that pale form of Dido, gliding from the e}' e of her lover into the gloom ; poetry clustering round the rock of Theseus, and the wheel of Ixion. In their pictures of Elysium, too, there was a soft and melancholy en- chantment, most beauteous, yet most rueful to feel. It was " sunlight sheathed." It was heaven, with a shade, not un- allied to earth, vailing its brightness. There might be, to quote Wordsworth imitating Virgil, *' An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpurea! gleams, Climes "which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth owns, is all unworthy to survey." But surely the radiance had not that spirituality, or solemn beauty, which characterizes our heaven.* The agonies, too, were monotonous attitudes of material woe ; they lacked dignity and relief; sculptured with rude power, they were sculptured in rock ; their line was too uniform and too black ; they lacked those redeeming touches which, like white streaks upon marble, mingle with, and carry off, the uniform intensity of gloom. All wretchedness lay upon them ; but it was a silent not an eloquent misery. Despair looked through them ; but it was dumb, deaf, and dead. Eternity brooded over the whole ; but it was dull and idle, hke the calm, sullen face of a marsh or moorland, not the living look of a mountain or of the sea. There is no change, no " lower deep conducting to a yet lower," in a descending series. Intercourse with other worlds there is little or none. The region is insulated in its misery — " beyond the beams of noon, and eve's one star." No stray angel looks down sud- denly, hke a sunbeam, into its darkness. No grand procession comes from afar, to look and wonder at its miseries. It is a neglected ruin, rather than a prison of pain. Such is the heathen hell, as discovered to us, by Virgil, but especially by Homer. * We speak here not so much of the Jewish as of the Christian notions of the future state. OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 35 How different, and how much more striking, the ghmpses in Scripture, penciled, as through chinks in the wall of the man- sion of the second death ! Its locality is untold, its creation and date are left in obscurity, its names are various — but all rather \7ails than discoveries of what seems elaborately concealed. It -s hell, the hidden or sunken place ; it is Gehenna, Tophet ; it IS a smoke ascending, as if to darken the universe ; it is a lake burning with fire and brimstone, but of which the interior is unseen ; it is a pit bottomless, a fire unquenchable, a worm un- dying, a death — the second and the last ; it is " without," yet not unvisited or unseen ; they shall be tormented in the pres- ence of the Lamb and the holy angels ; they shall go forth, and look on the carcasses of them that are slain, whose worm dieth not. This is all, or nearly all we know of it. And yet how unspeakably tremendous ! Like the disjointed words upon the wall (in Coleridge's " Dream") taken singly, each word is a riddle — put them together, and what a lesson of lurid terror do they combine to teach ! And from such pregnant expressions have come forth, accordingly, all the sublime and dreary dreams of after-poetry, the savage sculpture of Dante, Milton's broad pictures,. Pollok's bold sketch, and the whole gallery of gloomy visions which may be found in our great religious prose-authors, from Jeremy Taylor to Thomas Aird. The next influence we mention, as operating on the Hebrew poets, is the climate and scenery of their country. To be sus- ceptible of such skyey influences is one main distinction between genius and mere talent, and also between the enthusiast sfnd the fanatic. There is a vulgar earnestness which, while address-, ing a multitude amid the most enchanting scenery, and at the spiritual hour of evening, would feel no elevation, but bellow on as before, susceptible only to the animal sympathy arising from the concourse of human beings, and not at all to the gradual shading in of the sky over that sea of faces, to the voice of the distant streams, and to the upper congregation of the stars, com- ing out, as if they too would listen to the Gospel of glad tidings. Not thus was Paul unaware of the scene, at Mars Hill, as he 36 CIRCUMSTAXCES CREATING AND MODIFYINa preached Jesus and the resurrection. TSTot thus iixhfferent was Edward Irving to the glories of the Frith of Forth, as again and again, in the open air and in full view of them, "rolled the rich thunder of his awful voice," to thousands of silent men. Even the more literal soul of Whitefield caught occasionally in such scenes a glow of enthusiasm, and the coarse current of his thought and diction was tinged with a gleam of poetry. It is vain to say that some men will, nay, ought to be so swallowed up in their subject, as to remember nothing besides. Religion, on the contrary, is a subject which, if properly presented, will challenge, as its own, alike the splendors of earth and heaven, and the voice of the true poet-preacher will appear, as it rises and swells with the theme, worthy of concerting with the eldest harmonies of nature. Those modes, on the other hand, of pre- senting rehgious truth, which, amid beautiful scenery and seasons of special spiritual interest, seem harsh, hard, unsuitable, which jar upon the musical sweetness and incense breathing all around, and of which the echo sounds from above like a scream of laughter, contradiction, and scorn, are therein proved to be im- perfect, if not false. They are not in unison with the spirit of the surrounding universe, but are rejected and flung back by it as foul or rabid felsehoods. The Hebrew prophets lived in the eye of nature. We always figure them with cheeks embrowned by the noons of the East. The sun had looked on them, but it was lovingly — the moon had " smitten" them, but it was with poetry, not madness — they had drank in fire, the fire of Eastern day, from a hundred sources — from the lukevi^arm brooks of their land, from the rich colors of their vegetation, from their mornings of unclouded brightness, from their afternoons of thunder, from the large stars of their evenings and nights. The heat of their climate was strong enough to enkindle but not to enervate their frames, inured as they were to toil, fatigue, fasting, and frequent travel. They dwelt in a land of hills and valleys, of brooks and streams, of spots of exuberant vegetation, of iron-ribbed rocks and moun- tains — a land, on one side, dipping down in the Mediterraneaa OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 37 Sea, on another, floating up into Lebanon, and on the others, edged by deserts, teeming at once with dreadful, scenery and secrets — through which had passed of old time the march of the Almighty, and where his anger had left for its memorials, here, the sandy sepulcher of those thousands whose carcasses fell in the wilderness, and there, a whole Dead Sea of vengeance, lowering amid a desolation, fit to be the very gateway of hell — standing between their song and subject-matter, and such a fiery clime, and such stern scenery — the Hebrew bards were enabled to indite a language more deeply dyed in the colors of the sun, more intensely metaphorical, more faithfully tran- scriptive of nature, a simpler, and yet larger utterance, than ever before or since rushed out from the heart and tongue of man. And not merely were there thus certain general features connected with the leading events in Old Testament history, with the peculiar doctrines of the Jews, and with the climate and scenery of their country, which secured the existence of poetry, but the very construction and characteristics of the Hebrew tongue were favorable to its birth. Destitute of the richness and infinite flexibility of the Greek, the artificial state- liness and strength of the Latin, and the varied resources and borrowed beauties of modern languages, Adam's tongue — the language of the early giants of the species — was fitted, beyond them all, for the purposes of lofty poetry. It was, in the first place, as Herder well calls it, an abyss of verhs ; and there is no part of speech so w^ell adapted as the verb to express motion, energetic action, quick transition, and strong endurance. This language was no quiet or sullen sea, but all ahve, speaking, ■surging, now bursting in breaker, and now heaving in long deep swell. Its adjectives were borrowed from verbs, served their purposes, and did their work ; and, though barren in ab- stract terms, it was none the less adapted for the purposes of poetry ; for it abounded in sensuous terms — it swarmed with words descriptive of the objects of nature. It contains, amid its apparent inopia verborum, more than two hundred and fifty 38 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYING botanical terms ; and, then, its utterance, more than that of any other tongue, was a voice from the heart. We sometimes hear orators wlio appear to speak with the iungs, instead of the hps ; but the Hebrews heaved up their rage and their joy, their grief and their terror, from the depths of their hearts. By their fre- quent use, too, of the present tense, they have unconsciously contributed to the picturesque and powerful effect of their writings. This has quickened their every page, and made their words, if we may so speak, to stand on end. It may, indeed, be objected to Hebrew poetry, that it has no regular rhythm, except a rude parallelism. What then ? Must it be, therefore, altogether destitute of music ? Has not the rain a rhythm of its own, as it patters on the pane, or sinks on the bosom of its kindred pool ? Hath not the wind a harmony, as it bows the groaning woods, or howls over the mansions of the dead ? Have not the waves of ocean their wild base ? Has not the thunder its own " deep and dreadful organ-pipe ?" Do they speak in rhyme? Do they murmur in blank verse? Who taught them to begin in Iambics, or to close in Alexan- drines ? And shall not God's own speech have a peculiar note, no more barbarous than is the voice of the old woods or the older cataracts ? Besides, to call parallelism a coarse or uncouth rhythm, be-- trays an ignorance of its nature. Without entering at large on the subject of Hebrew versification, we may ask any one, who has paid even a slight attention to the subject, if the effect, whether of the gradational parallel, in which the second or responsive clause rises above the first, like the round of a ladder, as in the 1st Psalm — " Blessed is the man That hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stood in the way of sinners : And hath not sat in the seat of the scornful ;" or the antithetical parallel, in which two lines con-espond with each other, by an opposition of terms and sentiments, as in the words — OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 39 " The memory of the just is blessed, But the name of the wicked shall rot ;" or the constructive parallel, in which word does not answer to word, nor sentence, as equivalent or oj^posite, but there is a cor- respondence and equahty between the different propositions, in the turn and shape of the whole sentence, and of the construc- tive parts — noun answering to noun, verb to verb, negative to negative, interrogation to interrogation, as in the 19th Psalm — " The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul ; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple ;" or, finally, the introverted parallel, in which, whatever be the number of lines, the first runs parallel with the last, the second with the penultimate, and so throughout, such as — " My son, if thine heart be wise, My heart shall rejoice, even mine ; Yea, my reins shall rejoice When thy lips speak right things — " We ask, if the effect of all these, perpetually intermingled as they are, be not to enliven the composition, often to give dis- tinctness and precision to the train of thought, to impress the sentiments upon the memor}^, and to give out a harmony, which, if inferior to rhyme in the compression produced by the difficulty (surmounted) of uniting varied sense with recurring sound, and in the pleasure of surprise ; and to blank verse, in freedom, in the effects produced by the variety of pause, and in the force of long and linked passages, as well as of insulated lines, is less slavish than the one, and less arbitrary than the other ? Unlike rhyme, its point is more that of thought than of lan- guage ; unlike blank verse, it never can, however managed, de- generate into heavy prose. Such is parallelism, which generally forms the differential quality of the poetry of Scripture, although there are many passages in it destitute of this aid, and which yet in the spirit they breathe, and the metaphors by which they are garnished, are genuine and high poetry. And there can be little 40 CIRCUMSTANCES CREATING AND MODIFYINa question, that in the parallelism of the Hebrew tongue we can trace many of the peculiarities of modern writing, and in it find the fountain of the rhythm, the pomp, and antithesis, which lend often such grace, and always such energy, to the style of Johnson, of Junius, of Burke, of Hall, of Chalmers — indeed, of most writers who rise to the grand swells of prose-poetry. Ere closing this chapter, we may mention one other curious use of parallelism by the Jewish poets. As it is, confessedly, the key to the tower of Hebrew verse, and as, in one species of it, between every two distichs, and every two parts of a sentence, there is an alternation, like the backward and forward move- ments of a dance, so the sacred writers keep np a similar inter- change between the vast concave above and the world below. Mark this in the history of the creation. At first, there is dark- ness above and darkness below. Then, as the earth is enlight- ened, the sky is illumined too ; the earth is brought forth from the grave of chaos ; the heaven is uplifted in its " terrible crys- tal ;" and, ere the earth is inhabited, the air is peopled. Again, as to their present state, the heaven is God's throne, the earth his footstool — grandeur sits on the one, insignificance cowers on the other ; power resides above in the meteors, the storms, the stars, the lightnings, the sunbeams — passive weakness shrinks and trembles below. The one is a place, nay, a womb of glory, from which angels glide, and Deity himself at times descends. The other is a tomb, an Aceldama, a Golgotha ; and yet, though the one, in com'parison with the other, be so groveling and mean, taken in connection with the other, it catches and reflects a certain degree of glory. It has no light in itself, but the sun condescends to shine upon it, to gild its streams and to touch its mountains, as with the finger of God. It is a footstool, but it is God's footstool. It is a tomb, but a tomb set in the blue of heaven. It has no power in itself, but it witnesses and feels the energies of the upper universe. It is not the habi- tation of demons, or angels, or God : but angels rest their feet upon its hills, demons walk to and fro through its wastes, and God has been heard sometimes in its groves or gardens, in the OLD TESTAMENT POETRY. 41 cool wind of the day. Hence, while righteousness looks down from heaven, truth springs from earth. Hence, the prophet, after saying, " Give ear, O ye heavens ! and I will speak," adds, " and hear, O earth ! the words of my mouth." So much for this mighty prophetical dance or parallelism between earth and heaven."^" * See, on this subject, Herder's " Spirit of Hebrew Poetry." CHAPTER 11. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. At the hazard of retreading here and there our own steps in the Introduction, we must speak separately of the general character- istics of Hebrew poets. To the first we intend to name of these, we have referred already — it is their figurative language. Like the swan on still St. Mary's Lake, each thought "floats double," — each birth is of twins. It is so with all high thoughts, ex- cept, perhaps, those of geometrical abstraction. The -proof of great thoughts is, will they translate into figured and sensuous expression? will nature recognize, own, and clothe them, as if they were her own ? or must they stand, small, shivering, and naked, before her unopened door ? But here we must make a distinction. Many thoughts find, after beating about for, natural analogies — they strain a tribute. The thought of genius precedes its word, only as the flash of the lightning the roar of the near thunder ; nay, they often seem identicaL Now, the images of Scripture are peculiarly of this description. The connection between them and their wedded thoughts seems necessary. With this is closely connected the naturalness of Scripture figure. No critical reproach is more common, or more indiscriminate, than that which imputes to writers want of na- ture. For nature is often a conventional term. What is as natural to one man as to breathe, would be, and seems, to an- other, the spasm of imbecile agony. Consequently, the ornate writer can not often believe himself ornate, can not help thinking and speaking in figure, and is astonished to hear elaboration im- puted to passages which have been literally each the work of an GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 43 hour. But all modern styles are more or less artificial. Their lire is in part a false fire. The spirit of those unnaturally ex- cited ages, rendered feverish by luxuries, by stimulants, by un- certainties, by changes, and by raging speculation, has blown sevenfold their native ardor, and rendered its accurate analysis difficult. Whereas, the fire of the Hebrews — a people living on corn, water, or milk — sitting under their vine, but seldom tast- ing its juice — dwelling alone, and not reckoned among the nations — ^surrounded by customs and manners ancient and unchangeable as the mountains, — a fire fed chiefly by the still aspects of their scenery, the force of their piety, the influences of their climate, the forms of their worship, and the memories of their past — was a fire as natural as that of a volcano. The figures used are just the burning coals of that flame, and come forth in brief, impet- uous, impatient volleys. There is scarcely any artifice or even art in their use. Hebrew art went no farther than to construct a simple form of versification. The management of figures, in what numbers they should be introduced, from what objects drawn, to what length expanded, how often repeated, and how so set as to tell most powerfully, was beyond or beneath it. Enough that the crater of the Hebrew bosom was never empty, that the fire was always there ready to fill every channel pre- sented to it, and to change every object it met into itself. The figures of the Hebrews were very numerous. Their country, indeed, was limited in extent, and the objects it con- tained, consequently, rather marked than manifold. But the " mind is its own place," and from that land flowing with milk and honey, what a rich herbarium^ aviary^ menagei'ie, have the bards of the Bible collected and consecrated to God ! We re- call not our former w^ord, that they have ransacked creation in the sw^eep of their genius ; for all the bold features and main elements of the world, enhanced, too, by the force of enthusiasm, and shown in a light which is not of the earth, are to be found in them. Their images are never forced out, nor are they sprinkled over the page with a chariness, savoring more of poverty than of taste, but hurry forth, thick and intertangled^ 44 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. like sparks from the furnace. Each figure, too, proceeding as it does, not from the playful mint of fancy, but from the solemn forge of imagination, seems sanctified in its birth, an awful and holy, as well as a lovely thing. The flowers laid on God's altar have indeed been gathered in the gardens and wildernesses of earth, but the dew and the divinity of Heaven are resting on every bud and blade. It seems less a human tribute than a selection from the Godlike rendered back to God. We name, as a second characteristic of Hebrew poetry, its simphcity. This approaches the degree of artlessness. The Hebrew poets were, indeed, full-grown and stern men, but they united with this quality a certain childlikeness, for which, at least, in all its simplicity, we may search other literatures in vain. We find this in their selection of topics. Subjects ex- ceedingly dehcate, and, to fastidious civilization, offensive, are occasionally alluded to with a plainness of speech springing from perfect innocence of intention. The language of Scripture, like the finger of the sun, touches uncleanness, and remains pure. " Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled ?" The quiet, holy hand of a Moses or an Ezekiel can. The proof is, that none of the descriptions they give us of sin have ever inflamed the most inflammable imagination. Men read the 20th chapter of Leviticus, and the 23d of Ezekiel, precisely as they witness the unwitting actions of a child ; nay, they feel their moral sense strengthened and purified by the exposures of vice which such passages contain. The Jewish writers manifest this simplicity, too, in the extreme width and homeliness of their imagery. They draw their images from all that interests man, or that bears the faintest reflection of the face of God. The willow by the water-courses, and the cedar on Lebanon — the ant and the levia- than — the widow's cruse of oil and Sinai's fount of fire — the sower overtaking the reaper, and God coming from Teman and from Paran — Jael's tent-nail, and Elijah's fiery chariot — boys and girls playing in the streets of Jerusalem — and those angels that are spirits, and those ministers that are flames of fire ; yea, meaner obiects than any of these are selected impartially to GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 45 illustrate the great truths which are the subjects of their song. The path of every true poet should be the path of the sun rays, which, secure in their own purity and directness, pass, fearless as the spirit of a child, through all deep, dark, intricate, or unholy places — equally illustrate the crest of a serpent and the wing of a bird — pause on the summit of an ant-hillock, as on the brow of Mont Blanc — take up as a " little thing" alike the crater and the shed cone of the pine — and after they have, in one wide char- ity, embraced all shaped and sentient things, expend their waste strength and beauty upon the inane space beyond. Thus does the imagination of the Hebrew bard count no subject too low, and none too high, for its comprehensive and incontrollable sweep. Unconsciousness we hold to be the highest style of simplicity and of genius. It has been said, indeed, by a high authority (the late John Sterling), that men of genius are conscious, not of what is peculiar in the individual, but of what is universal in the race ; of what characterizes not a man, but Man — not of their own individual genius, but of God, as moving within their minds. Yet, what in reality is this, but the unconscious- ness, for which we would contend ? When we say that men of genius, in their highest moods, are unconscious, we mean, not that these men become the mere tubes through which a foreign influence descends, but that certain lofty emotions or ideas so fill and possess them, as to produce temporary for- getfulness of themselves, except as the passive though intel- ligent instruments of the feeling or the thought. It is true, that afterward self may suggest the reflection — " the fact that we have been 'selected to receive and convey such melodies proves our breadth and fitness ; it is from the oak, not the reed, that the wind elicits its deepest music." But, in the first place, this thought never takes place at the same time with the true afflatus, and is almost inconsistent with its presence. It is a mere after-inference ; an inference, secondly, which is not always made ; nay, thirdly, an inference which is often rejected, when the poet off" the stool feels tempted to regard with suspicion or shuddering disgust the results of his 40 GENEHAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. raptured hour of inspiration. Milton seems to have shrunk back at the retrospect of the height he had reached in the " Paradise Lost," and preferred his " Paradise Regained." Shakspeare, on the other hand, having wrought his tragic miracles under a more entire self-abandonment, becomes, in his Sonnets, owinsj to a reflex act of sac^acity, aware of what feats he had done. Bunyan is carried on through all the stasfes of his immortal Pilo-rimao-e like a child in the leadins^- strings of his nurse ; but, after looking back upon its com- pleted course, begins, with all the harmless vanity of a child (see his prefatory poem to the second part), to crow over the achievement. Thus all gifted spirits do best when they " know not what they do." The boy Tell " "Was great, nor knew how great he was." But, if this be true of men of genius, it is still more char- acteristic of the Bards of the Bible ; for they possess perfect passive reception in the moment of their utterance, and have given no symptoms of that after self-satisfaction wdiich it were hard to call, and harder to distinguish from, literary vanity. The head reels at the thought of Isaiah weighing his " Burdens" over ao-ainst the odes of Deborah or David ; or of Ezekiel measuring his intellectual stature with that of Daniel. Like many even- ing rivers of different bulks and channels, but descending from one chain of mountains, swollen by one rain, and meeting in one valley, do those mighty prophets lift up their unequal, unemulous, unconscious, but harmonious and heaven-seeking voices. We notice next the boldness, which is not inferior to the beauty of their speech. They use liberties, and dare darings, ■which make us tremble. One is reminded, while reading their words, of the unhinged intellect of the aged King of England, loosened from all law, delivered from all fear, having cast off every weight of custom, conventionalism, even reason, ranging at large, a fire-winged energy, free of the universe, exposing all the abuses of society, and asking strange and GERNRAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 47 unbidden questions at the Deity himself. Thus, not in frenz}% but in the height of the privilege of their peculiar power, do the Hebrew Prophets often invert the torrent of their argument and expostulation, curving it up from earth to heaven — from Man to God. Hear the words of Jeremiah — " O the Hope of Israel, the Savior thereof in time of trouble, why shouldst thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man, that turneth aside to tarry for a night ? Why shouldst thou be as a man astonished, as a mighty man that can not save ? Do not abhor us, for thy name's sake. Do not disgrace the throne of thy glonjP Or hear Job — " I know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. Behold, I cry out of ivrong^ but I am not heard. I cry aloud but there is no judgment. Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh ?" Or listen to Jonah's irony, thrown up in the very nostrils of Jehovah — "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil ; therefore, now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me." These ex- pressions, amid many similar, suggest the memory of those sublimest of uninspired words — " Ye heavens, If ye do love old men, if yonr sweet sway Hallow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause, avenge me of my daughters." Surely, there is in such words no irreverence or blasphemy. I^ay, on those moments, when prayer and prophecy transcend themselves, when the divine within, by the agony of its ear- nestness, is stung up almost to the measure and the stature of the divine above — when the soul rises in its majestic wrath, like " thunder heard remote" — is it not then that men have reached all but their highest point of elevation possible to them on earth, and felt as if they saw " God face to face, nor yet were blasted by his brow V 48 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. Very different, however, this sjairit, from that of some modern poets, wlio have " Rushed in -where angels fear to tread •" and, under the mask of fiction, have taken the opportunity of venting their spleen or personal disgust in the face of God. Without entering on the great enigma of the " Faust," or ven- turing to deny that Goethe's real purpose was reverence, we question much if the efifect of his opening scenes in heaven, be not to produce a very opposite and pernicious feeling. Byron, again, at one tim« stands in the august presence-chamber, like a sulky, speechless fiend, and, at another, asks small uneasy questions, like an ill-conditioned child. Dante and Milton alone, on this high platform, unite a thorough consciousness of them- selves, with a profound reverence for him in whose presence they stand ; they bend before, but do not shrivel up in his sight ; they come slowly and softly, but do not steal, into his presence. We must not stop to do more than allude to those modern caricaturists of Milton and Byron, who, in the guise of prodigious pietism, display a self-ignorance and self-conceit which are almost blasphemy, and who, as their plumes vain- gloriously bristle up and broaden in the eye of Deity, and as their harsh ambitious scream rises in his ear, present a spectacle which we know not whetlier to call more ludicrous or more horrible. But the boldness of the Hebrew bards, which we panegyrize, extends to more than their expressions of religious emotion — ^it extends to all their sentiment, to their style, and to their bear- ing. " They know not to give flattering titles ; in so doing," they feel " that their Maker would soon take them away." With God vertical over their head in all their motions, miserable courtiers and sycophants they would have made, even if such base avenues to success had been always open before them. They are the stern rebukers of wickedness in high places, the unhired advocates of the oppressed and the poor ; and fully do they purchase a title to the charge of being " troublers of Israel," GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY, 49 disturbing it as the hurricane the elements and haunts of the pestilence. All classes, from the King of Samaria to the drun- kard of Ephraim — from the Babylonian Lucifer, son of the morning, to the meanest, mincing, and wanton-eyed daughter of Zion, with her round tire, like 'the moon — kings, priests, peas- antry, goldsmiths, and carpenters — men and women, country- men and foreigners, must listen and tremble, when they smite with their hand and stamp with their foot. In them the moral conscience of the people found an incarnation, and stood at the corner of every street, to deplore degeneracy, to expose imposture, to blast the pretenses and the minions of despotism, to denounce every kind and degree of sin, and to point, with a finger which never shook, to the unrepealed code of Moses, and to the law written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, as the standards of rectitude. Where, in modern ages, can we find a class exerting or aspiring to such a province and such a power ? Individuals of prophetic mood we have had and have. We have had a Milton, " wasting his life" in loud or silent protest against that age of " evil days and evil tongues" on which he had fallen. We have had a Cowper, lifting up "Expostulations," not un- heard, to his degraded country. We have had an Edward Irving, his " neck clothed with thunder," and his loins girt with the "spirit and the povv^er of Elias," pealing out harsh truth, till he sank down, wearied and silent, in death. We have had a poor, bewildered Shelly, with eyes open to the disease, shut to the true remedy, sincere, beautiful, and lost, as a lunatic angel, yet with such melody in many of his words, that all men wept to hear them. We have still a Thomas Carlyle, who, from the study, where he might have trained himself for a great artist, has come forth, and, standing by the w^ayside, has uttered the old laws of justice and of retribution, with such force and ear- nestness that they seem new and burning " burdens," as if from the mountains of Israel. But we have not, and never have had, a class, anointed and consecrated by the hand of God to the utterance of eternal truth, as immediately taught them from be- Jiind and aSoi^e-^speaking, moving, looking, gesticulating, and Q 50 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. acting, "as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." Our poets have, in general, been beautiful mirrors of the beautiful, elegant and tuneful minstrels that could play well on an instrument, and that were to the world as a " very lovely song," — what else our Rogerses and Moores ? — not men persecuted and chased into action and utterance, by the apparition behind them of the true. Our statesmen, as a class, have been cold temporizers, mistaking craft for wisdom, success for merit, and the putting off the evil day for success. Our mental philosophers have done little else than translate into ingenious jargon the eldest senti- ments and intuitive knowledge of humanity — they have taught men to lisp of the Infinite by new methods, and to babble of the Eternal in terms elaborately and artistically feeble. Our preach- ers, as a body, have been barely faithful to their brief, and they have found that brief in the compass of a confession, rather than in the pages of the Bible, shown and expounded in the light of the great God-stricken soul within. But our prophets, where are they ? Where many who resemble those wild, wandering, but holy flames of fire, which once ran along the highways, the hills, and the market-places of Palestine ? Instead, what find we ? For the most part, an assortment of all varieties of scribbling, scheming, speculating, and preaching machines, the most active of whose movements form the strongest antithesis to true life. Even the prophetic men among us display rather the mood than the insight of prophecy — rather its fire than its light, and rather its fury than its fire — rather a yearning after, than a feehng of the stoop of the descending God. We are compelled to take the complaint of the ancient seer, with a yet bitterer feeling than his — " Our signs we do not no-w behold There is not us among A prophet more, nor any one That knows the time how long." And we must even return, and sit at the feet of those bards of Israel, who, apart from their supernatural pretensions — as teach- ers, as poets, as truthful and earnest men— stand as yet alone, GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 51 ' unsurmounted and unapproached — tlie Himalayan mountains of mankind. Speaking out fearless sentiments, tlieir language is " loud and bold." It abounds in personifications, interrogations, apos- trophes, hyperboles, sudden and violent transitions, figures be- gun to be bi'oken off, fierce, insulated, and ragged exclamations, all those outlets of strong emotion which rhetoric has since been occupied in measuring and squaring. It is a compound of the language of poetry, oratory, and prayer. Its vehemence, ar- dor, simplicity, picturesque and poetic character, as well as its divine' worth, have carried it safe through every ordeal of trans- lation ; it has mixed with the stream of every language unin- jured, nay, has finely colored the literary style of Europe. The charm which Scripture quotation adds to writing, let those tell who have read Milton, Bunyan, Burke, Foster, Southey, Croly, Carlyle, Macaulay, yea, and even Byron, all of whom have sown their pages with this " orient pearl," and brought thus an impulse from divine inspiration, to add to the effect of their own. Extracts from the Bible always attest and vindicate their origin. They nerve what else in the sentences in which they occur is pointless ; they clear a space for themselves, and cast a wide glory around the page where they are found. Taken from the classics of the heart, all hearts vibrate more or less strongly to their voice. It is even as David felt of old to- ward the sword of Goliath, when he visited the high-priest, and said, "There is none like that, give it me;" so writers of true taste and sympathies feel on great occasions, when they have certain thoughts and feelings to express, a longing for that sharp two-edged sword, and an irresistible inclination to cry, " None like that, give it us ; this right Damascus blade alone can cut the way of our thought into full utterance and victory." And did the bearing of those inspired men correspond with, their sentiments and speech ? It did. The Hebrew prophet, in his highest form, was a solitary and salvage man, residing with lions, when he was not waylaying kings, on whose brow the scorching sun of Syria had charactered its fierce and swarthy 52 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. hue, and whose dark eye swam with a fine insanity, gathered from sohtary communings with the sand, the sea, the moun- tains, and the sky, as well as with the hght of a divine aflflatus. He had lain in the cockatrice's den ; he had put his hand on the hole of the asp ; he had spent the night on lion-surrounded trees, and slept and dreamed amid their hungry roar ; he had swam in the Dead Sea, or haunted, like a ghost, those dreary caves which lowered around it ; he had drank of the melted snow on the top of Lebanon ; at Sinai, he had traced and trod on the burning footprints of Jehovah ; he had heard messages at mid- night, which made his hair to arise, and his skin to creep ; ho had been wet with the dews of the night, and girt by the demons of the wilderness ; he had been tossed up and down, like a leaf, upon the strong and veering storm of his inspira- tion. He was essentially a lonely man, cut oflf, by gulf upon gulf, from tender ties and human associations. He had no home ; a wife he might be permitted to marry, but, as in the case of Hosea, the permission might only be to him a curse, and to his people an emblem, and when (as in the case of Ezekiel) her death became necessary as a sign, she died, and left him in the same austere seclusion in which he had existed before. The power which came upon him cut, by its fierce coming, all the threads which bound him to his kind, tore him from the plow, or from the pastoral solitude, and hurried him to the desert, and thence to the foot of the throne, or to the wheel of the triumphal chariot. And how startMng his coming to crowned or conquer- ing guilt ! Wild from the wilderness, bearded like its lion- lord ; the fury of God glaring in his eye ; his mantle heaving to his heaving breast ; his words stern, swelling, tinged on their edges with a terrible poetry ; his attitude dignity ; his gesture power — how did he burst upon the astonished gaze ; how swift and solemn his entrance ; how short and spirit-like his stay ; how dreamy, yet distinctly dreadful, the impression made by his words long after they had ceased to tingle on the ears ; and how mysterious the solitude into which he seemed to melt away ! Poet, nay prophet, were a feeble name for such a being. He GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 53 was a momentary incarnation — a meteor kindled at the eye, and blown on the breath, of the Eternal. To much of this description all the prophets answer ; but we have had in our eye principally Elijah, whom God testified to be the greatest of the family, by raising him to heaven. Sudden as a vision of the night, he stands up before Ahab, the evil King of Israel, and the historian no more thinks of recounting his an- cestry, than he would of tracing that of a dream. He delivers his message, and instantly retires from the scene. We see him, however, a little afterward, in a poor widow's dwelling ; and lo ! he breathes upon her handful of meal, and blesses her cruse of oil, and they are multiplied a thousandfold ; and when death stops the dearer fountain of her son's life, he has but to bow himself three times upon the child, and the spring shut up softly opens again. He appears after this on Carmel — meet pedestal for a statue so sublime ! He had previously burst a second time into Ahab's presence, and, careless of the exclamation, " Art thou he that troublest Israel ?" had challenged him, and Baal, his god, and Baal's prophets, four hundred and fifty, and the proj^hets of the groves, four hundred, to meet him on Car- mel, and have the question of the land and of the age — is Baal or is Jehovah God ? — there decided, by an appeal to the ancient, the chainless, the impartial element of fire. It is the question of this age, too ! Show us the fire of heaven, still burning and vestal, in any church, and it sufficeth us ; for Christ came to send fire upon earth, and what will we, if it have gone out in white and barren ashes ? The God that answereth by fire answered Elijah, and the sun, his archer, loosened a ray which consumed burnt-sacrifice, wood, stones, dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. We see him next, a girt and glorious homicide, standing at the brook Klshon, and th^-e, with knife moving to the music of God's voice, slaying the false pro- phets, " heaps upon heaps." We again find him compeUing clouds and rain from the brassy sky, and, " through fire and water," running before Ahab's chariot, to the entrance of Jez- reel. We follow him, then, a fugitive from Jezebel's vengeance, 54 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. on liis way toward Horeb, the mount of God ; fed by an angel ; lodging in a cave ; bearing afar off the voice of Jehovah ; watch- ing the couriers of the divine coming — the wind, the earthquake, the fire ; and at last made aware of that coming itself, in the still small voice, and covering his face with a mantle, as he came out to the mouth of the cave. Instructed in the duties he had to perform during his brief remaining career, cheered by the tidings of seven thousand who had not bent the knee to Baal, and prepared by that celestial colloquy for the great change at hand, we see him returning to the haunts of men — anointing Elisha his successor — once more " finding" guilty Ahab, who trembles in his presence more than if the ghost of Naboth had stood up before him — and, as his last public act, bringing down new forks of flame upon the fifties and their captains, who in vain sought him to prophesy health and life to the dying Aha- ziah. We see him, then, turning his slow majestic steps* to- ward the Jordan, oft reverting his eyes to the mountains of his native land, which he is leaving forever; shaking off by his stride like gossamer the inquisitive sons of the prophets, till Elisha and he are seen moving on alone ; his eye waxing brighter, and his step quicker, and his port loftier, as he talks to his companion, and approaches the stream ; standing for a moment silent on its brink — lifting then his mantle, wrapping it together, smiting the waters, and they part hither and thither ; resuming, on the other side, the high converse, but now, with eager glances cast ever and anon onward ; at length, meeting the fiery chariot, mounting it, as a king his car, and carried, without a moment's delay, in a rushing whirlwind upward — his mantle falling, and Elisha exclaiming, '' My fiither, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!" We may ngi»t farther or fully follow his triumphal progress, but, doubtless, as like a prince he had mounted the chariot, so with prince-like majesty did he direct the fiery steeds, gaze around on the peopled wilderness of worlds, outstrip the comet's glow- ing wheel, rise above the sun, and the sun's sun, and every sys- tem from which the sun's system is visible, cross the firmaments GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 55 of space, pass tbrough the gates into the city, enter amid the rising, welcoming, and wondering first-born of heaven, and at last merge in the engulfing glorj- of the great white throne. Sucii honor have not all God's saints, nor have had all his prophets. But surely here the dignity of the prophetic office came to its height, when, in the fullness of its discharge, it swelled up into heaven, and when he^who, in the native gran- deur of his commission, had walked among men as a being of another race, was lifted up before his time, like a pearl from the dust, and added to an immortal and sinless company. We mention as the last general characteristic of Hebrew poetry, its high moral tone and constant religious reference. Without occu[r)-ing the full position of Dr. Johnson, in his cele- brated ex cathedra and d i:>riori sentence against sacred poetry, we are forced to admit that, of sacred poetry, in its higher ac- ceptation, we have had little, and that our sacred poets are few. There are, we think, but three poets — Dante, Milton, and Cowper — entitled at once to the terms sacred and great. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, James and Robert Montgomery, Milman, PoUok, Trench, and Keble, are sacred poets, and much of their poetry is true and beautiful ; but the shy epithet "great" will hardly alight on any one of their heads. Spenser, Cowley, Pope, Addison, Scott, Wordsworth, Wilson, Coleridge, and Southey, have all written sacred poems (Coleridge's Hymn to Mont Blanc, and Scott's Hymn of Rebecca, in Ivanhoe, are sur- passed only by the Hebrew bards) ; but none of them is prop- erly a sacred poet. For some of the best of our sacred veises, we are indebted to such men as Christopher Smart, John Logan, and William Knox. Of the tribe of ordinary hymn writers, whose drawl and lisping drivel — whose sickening sentimen- talisra — whose unintentional blasphemies of familiarity with divine things and persons — whose profusion of such fulsome epithets as "sweet Jesus," "dear Lord," "dear Christ," &c., render them so undeservedly popular, what need we say, un- k'ss it be to express our surprise that a stern Scottish taste, accustomed to admire the " Dies L'cie," our own rough but 5Q GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. manly version of the Psalms, and our own simple and im- pretending Paraphrases, should dream of introducing into our sanctuaries the trash commonly known as hymns! The writer of sacred poetry should be himself a sacred poet, for none else can continuously, or at large, wi'ite what both the critic and the Christian will value, though for different reasons — the Christian for its spirit and tendency, the critic for its thorough artistic adaptation to the theme. The Hebrew poet was nothing, if not sacred. To him, the poetical and the religious were almost the same. Song was the form instinctively assumed by all the higher moods of his wor- ship. He was not surprised into religious emotion and poetry by the influence of circumstances, nor stung into it by the pressure of remorse. He was not religious only when the organ was playing, nor most so — like Burns and Byron — on a sun- shiny day. Religion was with him a habitual feeling, and from the joy or the agony of that feeling poetry broke out irrepres- sibly. To him, the question " Are you in a religious mood to- day ?" had been as absurd as " Are you alive to-day ?" for all his moods — whether high as heaven or low as hell — whether wretched as the penitence of David, or triumphant as the rap- ture of Isaiah — were tinged with the religious element. From God he sank, or up to him he soared. The grand theocracy around ruled all the soul and all the song of the bard. Wher- ever he stood — under the silent starry canopy, or in the congre- gation of the faithful — musing in solitary spots, or smiting, with high, hot, rebounding hand, the loud cymbal — his feeling was, " How dreadful is this place ! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." In him, surrounded by sacred influences, haunted by sacred recollections, moving through a holy land, and overhung by a heavenly presence, re- ligion became a passion, a patriotism, and a poetry. Hence, the sacred song of the Hebrews stands alone ; and hence we may draw the deduction, that its equal we shall never see again, till again religion enshrine the earth with an atmosphere as it then enshrined Palestine — till poets are the organs, not only of their GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. 57 personal belief, but of the general sentiment around them, and have become but the high-priests in a vast sanctuary, where all shall be worshipers, because all is felt to be divine. How this high and solemn reference to the Supreme Intelligence and Great Whole comes forth in all the varied forms of Hebrew poetry ! Is it the pastoral ? — The Lord is the shepherd. Is it elegy ? — It bewails his absence. Is it ode ? — It cries aloud for his re- turn, or shouts his praise. Is it the historical ballad ? — It re- counts his deeds. Is it the penitential psalm ? — Its- climax is, " Against thee only have I sinned." Is it the didactic poem ? —Running down through the w^orld, like a sythed chariot, and hewing down before it all things as vanity, it clears the way to the final conclusion, " Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Is it a " burden," tossed, as from a midnight mountain, by the hand of lonely seer, to- ward the lands of Egypt and Babylon ? — It is the burden of the Lord ; his the handful of devouring fire flung by the fierce prophet. Is it apologue, or emblem ? — God's meaning hes in the hollow of the parable ; God's eye glares the " terrible crys- tal" over the rushing wheels. Even the love-canticle seems to rise above itself, and behold a greater than Solomon, and a fairer than his Egyptian spouse, are here. Thus, from their poetry, as fi'om a thousand mirrors, flashes back the one awful face of their God. CHAPTER III. VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY. It is common for a new writer on any subject to commence his work with open, or with gently insinuated, depreciation of those who have preceded him, or, at least, in the course of it, to " damn them with faint praise," or to hint and hesitate out strong but suppressed dislike. Not in conformity with this custom, we propose to commence this chapter by candidly char- acterizing the principal writers on Hebrew poetry, with whom we are acquainted. By far the most generally known of those writers is Bishop Lowth, the fourth edition of whose " Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews," translated from the Latin by G. Gregory, F.R.S., with notes by Michaelis and others, now lies before us. To use a term which this author himself employs ad nauseam^ Lowth's book is a very " elegant" production. It is written in a round, fluent, and perspicuous style ; abounds in learning and ingenious criticism ; is full to overflowing of speci- mens selected, and in general re-translated, from the Hebrew bards ; shows a warm love for their more prominent excel- lencies, and an intimate knowledge of their mechanical struc ture ; and did good service for their fame when first publisli^d To say, however, that it is ever more than " elegant," or evei rises to the " height of its great argument," were to compliment it too highly. It contains, indeed, much judicious criticism, some good writing, and a few touches of highly felicitous pane- gyric ; but, as a whole, it is tame almost to mediocrity — squares the Hebrew poetry too much by the standard of the Greek and VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY. { 69 Latin classics — displays little or no kindred genius—dilutes and deadens the portions of the Bible it professes to render into English verse — bears too decidedly the stamp of the eighteenth century — and does not at all fulfill its own expressed ideal, "He who would feel the peculiar and interior elegances of the He- brew poetry, must imagine himself exactly situated as the persons for whom it was written, or even as the writers them- selves — he is to feel as a Hebrew, to read Hebrew as the He- -brews would have read it." Lowth is very little of a Hebrew, and the point of view he occupies is for below the level of the " hills of holiness." His criticism bears not even the proportion to the subject which Pope's " Messiah" does to its original ; it wants subtilty, power, and abandonment. Much of his general preliminary matter is now obsolete, and the account which he gives of the individual writers is meager. He supplies a series of anatomical sketches, not of living portraits. He is to David and Isaiah what Warton was to Shakspeare, or Blair to Homer and Virgil. His translator has not been able altogether to overcome the air of stiffness which, adheres to all English ver- sions from the Latin. Nor do the notes by Michaelis add much to the book's value. They have, indeed, much learning, but their literary criticism is alike despicable and profane. " Eze- kiel," says our learned Theban, "does not strike with admiration, nor exhibit any trait of sublimity." Truly, over such a critic all the wheels of Chebar would roll in vain, for what impression can be made on insensate and infidel dust ? Even a mule would be awe-struck in the gorge of Glencoe, but a mule is only a relation to Michaelis. His translator sounds a deeper deep, and actually accuses Ezekiel of the bathos ! Such was the criticism of the past age. Rarely did it reach, in any of its altitudes of praise, a term higher than the afore- said " elegant" — a term which, while accurately measuring Pope and Addison, looks, when connected with Moses and Isaiah, ludicrously inadequate. The age, of which this was the superlative, could scarcely measure the poetry of that which 60 VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY. saw and sung the highest beauty and the loftiest grandeu embracing each other in the Temple under the shadow of " Jehovah thundering out of Zion, throned Between the cherubim." Lowth, to do him justice, deserved better company than Michaelis or Gregory. His step round the awful sanctities of Hebrew song is the light and trembhng step of a timid lover; and, for the sake of his love and sincerity, much must be for- given him, even although the oblivion demanded for his faults should at last engulf his merits too. Yet, as an inscription on a tombstone is often read, and is sometimes spared, for its Latinity, it may be hoped that so many fine and rolling periods, in the tongue of Cicero, shall long resist decay, even after they have ceased to be regarded with the former degree of respect and admiration. Herder was a man of " another spirit ;" and his report of the good land of Hebrew poetry, compared to Lowth's, is that of a Caleb or Joshua, to that of an ordinary Jewish spy. He does not climb from Parnassus to Lebanon, but descends on it from the " mountains of the East" — from a keen admiration and in- timate knowledge of the spirit and genius of all port of this division, we maintain, first, that it is com- prehensive, including every real species of poetry in Scripture — including, specially, the prophetic writings, the New Testa- ment, and that mass of seed poetry in which the Book abounds, apart from its professedly rhythmical and figured portions. Song and statement appear to include the Bible between them, and the statement is sometimes more poetical than the song. If aught evade this generalization, it is the argument which is charily sprinkled throughout the Epistles of Paul. Even that is logic defining the boundaries of the loftiest poetry. All else, from the simple narrations of Ezra and Nehemiah, up to the 'inost ornate and oratorical appeals of the prophets, is genuinely poetic, and ought by no means to be excluded from the range of our critical explication and panegyric. Surely the foam on the brow of the deep is not all its poetry, is not more poetical than the vast billows on which it swells and rises, and rather typifies than exhausts the boundless power and beauty which are be- low. " God is a spirit," or " God is love," contains, each sen- tence, a world of poetic beauty, as well as divine meaning. In- deed, certain prose sentences constitute the essence of all the poetry in the Scriptures. Round the rule " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind, and all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself," revolve the moral beauties and glories of both Testaments ; its praises are chanted alike by Sinai's thunders and the temple songs ; round it cluster the Psalms, and on it hang the Pro- phets. What planetary splendors gather and circle about the grand central truth contained in the opening verse, " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and about the cognate statement, "The Lord our God is one Lord!" And how simple that sentence which unites the psalmodies of earth and of heaven in one reverberating chorus, " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain !" Truly the songs of Scripture are mag- VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY. 67 nificent, but its statements are " words unutterable," ■which it is not possible for the tongue of man to utter I Secondly, Our division is simple, and is thus better fitted to the simplicity of the Hebrew poetrj^ It disguises less elaborately, and dresses less ostentatiously, the one main thing which lies within all the rhythmical books of the Bible. That one thing is lyrical impulse and fire. " Still its speech is song," whether one or many speakers be introduced, and whether that song mourn or rejoice, predict or instruct, narrate or adore. The Song of Solomon is a song, not a drama ; or let us call it a dramatic song. Job is a lyrical drama, or dramatic lyric. The histories are song-sprinkled narratives, facts moving to the sound of music and dancing. And the prophets seem all to stand, like Elisha, beside the kings of Israel and Judah, each one with a minstrel's harp beside him, and to it and the voice of accom- panying song, there break the clouds and expand the land- scapes of futurity. This lyrical impulse was not, however, the mere breath of human genius. It was the " wind of God's mouth," the im- mediate effect of a divine afflatus. This, former critics too much overlook. They find art where they ought to find inspiration ; or they cry out " genius," when they ought to say, with solemn reverence and whispered breath, " God." And by preserving, more entirely than others, the lyrical character of all Hebrew poetry, we supply this third reason for the adoption of our clas- sification — It links the effect more closely with its cause — it ex- hibits all Hebrew song, whether simple or compound, from Moses down to Malachi, as stirred into being by one Great Breath — finding in the successive poets and prophets, so many successive lyres for the music, soft or stormy, high or low, sad or joyful, which it wished to discourse. To say that all those lyres were natively of equal sweetness or compass, or that the Breath made them so— that all those poets were naturally, or by inspi- ration, alike eloquent and powerful, were to utter an absurdity. But is it less absurd to suppose a systematic decline in the fit- ness and fullness of the lyres — in the eloquence and power 68 VARIETIES OF HEBREW POETRY. of the propliets — when we remember, first, that Habakkuk, Haggai, and Zechariah, belonged to this hitter class ; when we remember, secondly, that the latter day of Judah exhibited crises of equal magaitii-de, and as w^orthy of poetic treatment, as its earlier; when we remember, thirdly, that the great event, the coming of Christ, to which all the prophets testified, was more clearly revealed to the last of the company ; and when we re- member, fourthly, that the power who overshadowed Malachi, was the same who inspired Moses — his eye no dimmer, his ear no heavier, his hand no shorter, and his breath no feebler than of old i No ! the peculiar prophetic and poetic influence did not gradually diminish, or by inches decay ; but whether owing to the sin of the people, or to the sovereignty of God, it seems to have expired in an instant. Prophecy went down at once, like the sun of the tropics, leaving behind it only such a faint train of zodiacal light as we find in the apocryphal books; nor did it re-appear, till it assumed the person of the Prophet of Galilee, and till he who in times past spoke nnto the fathers, by the prophets, did, in the last days, speak unto us by his own Son. CHAPTER lY. POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. We have intimated already, that, thougli we have, in the former chapter, chissitied Hebrew poetry under certain generic heads, we deem it best, in our future remarks, to pursue the method of following; it do^\^l as we find it in the various writinofs of Scripture. Such a method will secure variety, will lead to an informal history of the progress of Bible poetry, and prevent any of its prominent writers being overlooked, or lost amid vague and general description. We meet, first, with that singular collection of books called the Pentateuch — or Five Books of Moses — books which, though containing few professedly poetical passages, are steeped through- out in the essence of poetry. In the catalogue of Israel's prophetic bards, Moses stands earliest. Poets, indeed, and poetry there had been before him. Some of those aboriginal songs, such as Lamech's speech to his wives, and Jacob's dying words, Moses has himself pre- served ; but he undoubtedly was the Homer, as well as the Solon of his country. We never can separate his genius from his character, so meek, yet stern ; from his appearance, so gravely commanding, so spiritually severe ; from his law, "girt with dark thunder and embroidered fires;" and from certain incidents in his history — his figure in the ark, when, at the sight of the strange, richly-attired lady, " Behold the babe wept" — his attitude beside the bush that burned in the wilder- ness — his sudden entrance into the presence of Pharaoh — his lifting up, with that sinewy, swarthy hand, the rod over the •^0 POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. Red Sea — his ascent up the black precipices of Sinai — his death on Pisgah, with the promised land full in view— his mystic burial in a secret vale by the hand of the Eternal — his position, as the leader of the great Exodus of the tribes, and the founder of a strict, complicated, and magnificent polity — all this has given a supplemental and extraordinary interest to the writings of Moses. Their sublimity arises generally from the calm recital of great events. He is the sternest of all the Scripture writers, and the most laconic. His writings may be called hieroglyphics of the strangest and greatest events in the early part of the world's history. Summing up the work of innumerable ages in the one pregnant sentence with which the book begins, he then maps out in a chapter the arrangements of the present form of the creation, gives the miniature of the original condition of earth's happy inhabitants, and the hiero- glyphics of their fall ; runs rapidly across the antediluvian pa- triarchs ; gives, graphically, but simply, the grand outlines of the deluge ; traces to a short distance the diverging rivers of empire which flowed from the ark ; and embarks, in fine, upon the little, but widening stream of the story of Seth's children. When he begins to be anecdotical, the anecdotes are culled from a vast space of ground, which he leaves untouched. He is not a minute and full-length biographer, and never, till he comes to the details of the legal system, does he drop his Spartan garb of short and overleaping narrative, and become simply, yet nobly, diffuse. His style of writing resembles the characters sculptured on the walls of Egyptian temples, lower- ing over the gates of Thebes, or dim-discovered amid the vaults of the Pyramids, whence he, who afterward "refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter," drunk in the first draught of inspiration, to be renewed again and again, at holier fountains, till, sublimed by it, he dared to climb a quaking Sinai, and to front a fire-girt God. His style, col- ored by early familiarity with that strange, silent tongue, partakes here and there of certain of its qualities, its intri- cate simplicity, its " language within language" of allegorical POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCn. 71 meaning, and resembles tlie handwriting- of him who wrote on the wall of the Babylonian palace — " Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin." As a narrator, Moses makes a word or two do the work of pictures. Nor is this word always an snog msgoev — a word rolled together like a double star — but often a plain, unmeta- phorical tei-m, which quakes under the thought or scene it de- scribes. The pathos or the grandeur, instead of elevating and enkindling his language, levels and sinks it. His language may be called the mere transparent window through which the " immeasurable calm" — the blue of immensity — looks in. Certainly it is the least figurative of all the Scripture styles. Its simphcity is deeper than that of age's unmoved narratives ; it is rather that of infancy, telling some dreadful tale in an undertone, and with upcast looks of awe. It is as if Moses, at the feet of that simulacrum of Deity which he saw on the mount, had become a child ; as if the Glory, which might have maddened others, had only sunk him down into the ark of bulrushes again. And, from that hour, dropping all the learning of the Egyptians, the mystic folds of which he had wrapped around him, he is content to be the mere instrument in the Divine hand, and becomes, that meekest man — a boy repeating with quivering voice and heart the lesson his father has taught him. Hence the Fall is recounted without a word of comment or regret ; the sight of an ocean-world starts up but one expression which looks like a metaphor — the " windows of heaven ;" the journe}^ of Abraham, going forth, not knowing whither he went, in search of a far country — the most momentous journey in the history of m-an — is told as succinctly and quietly, as are afterward the delinquencies of Er and Judah ; through a naked narrative, bursts the deep pathos involved in the story of Joseph ; and how telescopic, in its clear calmness, his view of the Ten Plagues, sweeping in their course between the Nile of raging blood and the cry which proclaimed the findings of that fearful morning, when there was not a house but there was one dead — the whole '72 POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. dread circle of desolation, mourning, and woe. And oven wlien he brings us in sight of Sinai — the proud point in his life — the center of his system — the scene, too, of his sublime agony, for there did he not exceedingly fear and quake ? — his descrip- tion is no more than the bare transcript of its terrors. They are not grouped together, as by Paul afterward ; and far less are they exaggerated by rhetoiical artifice. This is the way in which he represents the fierce splen- dors which gathered around Sinai as the Ancient One de- scended : " And it came to pass, on tiie third day, in the morn- ing, that there were thunders, and hghtnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud, so that all the people which were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord de- scended upon it in fire ; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him b}' a voice." Nor did this intense simplicity betray any lack of poetical sensibility, or prove Moses a mere stony legislator, fitly typified by the cold tables which received and cooled the red dropping syllables of the "Fiery Law." That, on the contrary, he was actuated by a subHme lyric afflatus, which moved him at times, we have ample evidence in the odes which are found sprinkled through his books. Witness the pean of exultation which, chanted by the voices and cymbals of the millions of Israel, sung the requiem of Pharaoh and his "Memphian Chivalry;" and where, even as the naked storm of vocal sound intermarried and incarnated itself in timbrels and dances, so did the emotions of the lyrist clothe themselves in thick and vaulting imagery. In another strain — more subdued, more melting — does he, in the 90th Psalm, pour out the common plaint of all ages, over the shortness and fraiUy of life. But deepest the touch of poetry left on his last song, when, in his enthusiasm, he calls POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. 73 on heaven and earth to give audience tahis words, and proceeds to utter what might compel the attention of both, in a song that might be set to the sphere music, or sung in that floating melody — those " mystic snatches of harmonious sound" — which poets say sometimes visit this sad world, smooth its air, appease its hungry restlessness, and strike invisible, unaccountable, but short-lived joy, through all its withered veins. Moses we have called the Homer of his country ; nor is the epithet inappropriate, when we remember that both unite to simplicity that subhmity which flames out of it, like volcanic fire starting from a bare and bleak surface — that pathos which searches, in perfect unconsciousness, the inmost depths of the soul — and that air of Eld, which in both leads back our thoughts to primitive and perished ages, when the human heart, the human soul, the human size, were larger than now — when the heavens were nearer, the rddes clearer, the clouds more gorgeous, the foam of the sea brighter, the fat of the earth richer, than in our degenerate days — when the sense of the ideal and the infi- nite, of the things unseen and eternal, still overtopped the seen, the tangible, and the temporal — when in our groves were still seen the shadows of angels, and on our mountains the smoking footsteps of God. The effect of Moses upon the history of Hebrew poetry was, as Herder shows, manifold. In the first place, his deeds — the plagues he sent on Egypt, the passage of the Red Sea, the march through the wilderness, the wars in which he led the people to triumph — furnished fine poetical subjects, of which after-writers availed themselves. His whole system, too, was poetry organized, and hence sprung the songs of the sanctuary n David's and yet later days. Secondly, his own poems, though few, were very striking, and, both from their own power and as proceeding from the great legislator, were calculated to exert an influence on after-poets, who, indeed, made them their models. And, thirdly, Moses even provided for the revival of sacred poetry in times of declension, by the privilege he gave and secured to the prophets. They were the proper successors D 74 POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. of Moses — " watchmen who, when the priests were silent and the great tyrannical," spoke in startling truth and in poetic form to the heart and conscience of the land. Moses was the leader of this noble band, and his deep voice found in them a multi- tude of echoes, till, in Malachi, it died away in the muttering of the word " curse," which, closes the Old Testament record. One great image in Moses we must not overlook. It is at the crisis of the passage of the Red Sea, where, as the Egyp- tians are pressing down the dry channels, and treading in the shadows, and just fixing their grasp upon their foes, the Lord, through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, looks unto the host of the Egyptians, and troubles them. That pillar shapes itself into an eye, which sends a separate dismay into each Egyptian heart, and all is felt to be lost. We find two imita- tions of this in modern poetry — one by Coleridge, in his " Odo on the Departing Year," where he prays God to ** Open his eye of fire from some uncertain cloud ;" and another, in the " Curse of Kehama," where, after the " Man Almighty," holding his Amreeta cup, had exclaimed — " Now, Seeva, look to thine abode ! Henceforth, on equal footing, we engage Alike immortal now, and we shall wage Our warfare, God to God," it is added, when the cup is drank — " Then Seeva opened on the accursed one His eye of anger — upon him alone The wrath-beam fell. He shudders, but too late." Thus, by far the sublimest passage in Southey's poetry seems colored by, if not copied from, Scripture. PharaoKs eye meet- ing JeliovaKs in that grim hour— what a subject for John Martin, or for David Scott, had he been alive ! Herder has not failed to notice the air of solitude which breathes about the poetry, as it did about the character, of Moses. He was the loneliest of men : lonely in his flight from POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH. '75 Egypt — lonely while herding his flock in the wilderness — lonely while cUaibing Mount Sinai — lonely on the summit, and lonely when descending the sides of the hill — lonely in his death, and lonely in his burial. Even while minghng with the multitudes of Israel, he remained secluded and alone. As the glory which shone on his face insulated him for a time from men, so did all his life his majestic nature. He was among men, but not of them. Stern incaniation of the anger of Omnipotence, thy con- genial companions were not Aaron, nor Joshua, nor Zipporah, but the rocks and caves of Horeb, the fiery pillar, the bush, burning, the visible glory of the sanctuary, the lightning- wreaths round Sinai's sullen brow, and all other red symbols of Jehovah's presence I With such, like a kindred fire upon one funeral pile, didst thou gloomily embrace and hold still com- munion ! Shade of power not yet perished — sole lord of milHons still, wielding the two tables as the scepters of thy extant sov- ereignty, with thy face flashing back the splendors of the Divine eye, and seeming to descend evermore thy " Thunder-hill of Fear" — it is with a feehng of awful reverence that we bid thee farewell ! CHAPTER V. POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. Be tlie author of the book of Job who he may, he was not Moses. Nothing can be more unhke the curt and bare sim- phcity of Moses' style, than the broad-blown magnificence of Job. It is like one severe feather, compared to the outspread wing of an eagle. Moses had seen many countries and many men, had studied many sciences, and passed through numerous adventures, which tamed, yet strung his spirit. The author of Job is a contemplative enthusiast, who, the greater part of his life, had been girt in by the rocks of his country, and who, from glowing sand below, and ghttering crag around, and torrid sky above, had clothed his spirit and his language with a bar- baric splendor. He is a prince, but a prince throned in a wil- derness — a sage, but his wisdom has been taught him in the library of the everlasting hills — a poet, but his song is untaught and unmodified by art or learning, as that in which the night- ingale hails the hush of evening. The geography of the land of Job is a commentary on its poetry. Conceive a land lorded over by the sun, when lightning, rushing in, hke an angry painter, did not dash his vn\d colors "across the landscape ; a land ever in extremes — now dried up as in a furnace, now swimming with loud waters — its sky the "brightest or the black- est of heavens — desolate crags rising above rank vegetation- beauty adorning the brow of barrenness — shaggy and thunder- split hills surrounding narrow valleys and water-courses ; a land for a great part bare in the wrath of nature, when not swaddled iu sudden tempest and whirlwind ; a land of lions, and wild POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. V7 goats, and wild asses, and ostriches, and hawks stretching to- ward the south, and horses clothed with thunder, and eagles making their nests on high ; a land through whose transparent air night looked down in all her queenlike majesty, all her most lustrous ornaments on — the south blazing through all its chambers as w^ith solid gold — the north glorious with Arcturus and his sons — the zenith cpowning the heavens with a diadem of white, and blue, and purple stars. Such the land in which this author lived, such the sky he saw ; and can we wonder that poetry dropped on and from him, like rain "from a thick tree ; and that grandeur — a grandeur almost disdaining beauty, preferring firmaments to flowers, making its garlands of the whirlwind — became his very soul. The book of Job shows a mind smit with a passion for nature, in her simplest, most soli- tary, and elementary forms — gazing perpetually at the great shapes of the material universe, and reproducing to us the in- fant infinite wonder with which the first inhabitants of the world must have seen their first sunrise, their first thunder- storm, their first moon waning, their first midnight heaven ex- panding, like an arch of triumph, over their happy heads. One object of the book is to prophesy of nature — to declare its tes- timony to the Most High — to unite the leaves of its trees, the wings of its fowls, the eyes of its stars, in one act of adoration to Jehovah. August undertaking, and meet for one reared in the desert, anointed with the dew of heaven, and by God him- self inspired. If any one w^ord can express the merit of the natural descrip- tions in Job, it is the word gusto. You do something more than see his behemoth, his war-horse, and his leviathan : you touch, smell, hear, and handle them too. It is no shrrziow of the object he sets before you, but the object itself, in its length, breadth, height, and thickness. In this point, he is the Land- seer of ancient poetry, and something more. That great painter seems, every one knows, to become the animal he is painting — to intermingle his soul for a season with that of the stag, the horse, or the bloodhound. So Job, with the war-horse, swal- •^8 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. lows the ground with fierceness and rage — with behemoth, moves his tail hke a cedar — with the eagle, smells the slain afar off, and screams with shrill and far-heard joy. In the presence of Landseer's figures, you become inspired by the pervading* spirit of the picture — you start back, lest his sleeping blood- hound awake — you feel giddy beside his stag on the brow of the mountain — you look at his greyhound's beauty, almost with the admiration which he might be supposed to feel, glancing at his own figure, during his leap across the stream. Job's ani- mals seem almost higher than nature's. You hear God describ- ing and panegyrizing his own works, and are not ashamed to feel yourself pawing and snorting with his charger — carrying away your wild scorn and untamable freedom, with the ostrich, into the wilderness — or, with behemoth, drawing in Jordan into your mouth. It may be questioned if Landseer has the very highest imagination — if he be not rather a literal than an ideal painter — if he could, or durst, go down after Jonah into the whale, or exchange souls with the mammoth or megatherium ? Job uniformly transcends, while sympathizing with his subjects — casts on them a light not their own, as from the " eyelids of the morning ;" and the greater the subject is, he occupies and fills it with the more ease : he dandles his leviathan like a kid. Landseer we have charged, elsewhere, with almost an inhuman sympathy with brutes ; and a moral or religious lesson can with difficulty be gathered from his pictures — his dying deer M^ould tempt you, by their beauty, to renew the tragedy ; but Deus est anima hrutorum hangs suspended over Job's colossal drawings, and, as in fable, all his animals utter a moral while passing on before you. Near those descriptions of his, we can place noth- ing in picture, prose, or poetry, save such lines in Milton as that describing leviathan — " Whom God Created hugest that swim the ocean stream ;" or Blake's lines — " Tiger, tiger, burning bright In tlie deserts of the niarht. POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. ^9 "What immortal hand or eye Framed thy fearful symmetry ?" Besides those natural descriptions, the poetic elements in Job may be included under the following: — The scene in heaven, the calamities of Job, his first expression of anguish, the vision of Eliphaz, the moral pictures which abound, the praise of Wis- dom, the entrance of the Deity, the beauty of the close, and, above all, the great argument pervading the whole. The scene in heaven has always been admired, and often imitated. It struck Byron much ; particularlj^ the thought of Satan being actually brought back, as by an invisible chain, to the court of heaven, and compelled to witness its felicity, and subserve the purposes of God. Shelley, again, meditated a tragedy on the subject, which would have been, probably^, a very daring and powerful accommodation of Job to his own unhappy notions. Goethe, in his " Faust," and Bayley, in his " Festus," have both imitated this scen€. It abound^ at once in poetic interest and profound meaninp^. Job has previously been pictured sitting in peace and prosperity under his vine and fig-tree. He has little about him to excite any peculiar interest. Suddenly the blue curtain of the sky over his head seems to open, the theater of the highest heaven .expands, and of certain great transactions there he becomes the unconscious center. What a background now has that still figure ! Thus every man always is the hero of a triumph or a tragedy as wide as the universe. Thus "each" is always linked to "all." Thus above each world, too, do heaven and hell stand continually, like the dark and the bright suns of astronomy, and the planets between them. In that highest heaven, a' da}'' has dawned of solemn conclave. From their thousand missions of justice and mercy return the sons of God, to report their work and their tidings ; and inas- much as their work has been done, their aspects are equally tranquil, whether their tidings are evil or good. But, behind them, " A spirit of a different aspect waved His ■wings, lijje thunderclouds, above some coast, 80 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. "Whose barren beach with frequent wrecks is paved; His brow was like the deep when tempest- tost." He is a black spot in this " feast of charity," a scowl amid this splendor, and yet acts as only a foil to its beauty and bright- ness. Thus all things and beings are in perpetual communica- tion with their center — God ; thus even evil brings in its dark, barbaric tribute, and lays it down at his feet, and there is no energy in the universe so eccentric as not to have a path and perihelion around the central sun. Turning aside from the multitude of worshipers, the Al- mighty questions the grim spirit, " Whence coniest thou ?" — not, in surprise, " thou here ?" but, in inquiiy, " ivhence hast thou now come ?" The reply is, " From going to and fro in the earth." Yes ! the earth seems ever that spot of creation round which hifyher Intel] io-ences throno- not on account of the paltry stakes of battles and empires being played therein, but because there a mightier game, as to the reconciliation of man with God (thrilHng, though simple words ! words containing in them the problem of all theology !), is advancing with dubious aspect, though with certain issue. One man in the land of Uz seems to have attained the solution of that problem. He is at once virtuous and prosperous. .Adored by men, he adores God. He is wise, without any special inspiration. He is perfect, but not through suffering. He is clean, without atonement. This man is pointed out by God to Satan, " Behold the type of the Good Man ! what thinkest thou of him ? Canst thou perceive any flav; in his character ? Is he not at once great and good ?" The subtile spirit rejoins " that he has never been tried. He is pious because prosperous ; let afflictions strip away his green leaves, and they will discover a skeleton stretching out arms of defiance to heaven ; or should the tree, remaining itself unrau- tilated, though stripped of its foliage, droop in submission, yet let its trunk be touched and blasted, curses will come groaning np from the root to the topmost twig, and, falling, it will bow in blasphemy, not in prayer." AVhat is this, but a version of the fiendish insinuation, that there is no real worth or virtue in POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 8t: man but circumstances may overturn ; that religion is just a form of refined selfishness ; and that no mode of dealing, whether adverse or prosperous, on the part of God, can produce the de- sired reconciliation. And the purpose of the entire after-book is, in reply, to prove that afiuiiction, while stripping the tree, and even touching its inner life, only confirms its roots — that affliction not only tries, but purifies and tends to perfect, the suflferer — that individual suffering does not furnish an adequate index to individual culpability — that the tendency of suffering is to throw back the sufferer into the arms of the Great Inflictor, and to suggest the necessity of the medium which can alone complete reconciliation, that, narael}^ of intercessory sacrifice — that there is something higher than peace or happiness — and, finallv, that all this casts a softening and clearing luster upon the sad mys- teries of the world, as well as proves the necessity, asserts the possibility, assigns the means, and predicts the attainment, of final reconciliation. But this reply^ which is the argument of the poem, falls to bo considered afterward. The two first chapters are a full statement, in concrete form, of the grand difficulty. The thick succession of Job's calamities is one of the most striking passages in the poem. The conduct of Ford's heroine, who continues to dance on while news of " death, and death, and death," of brother, friend, husband, are brought her in suc- cession, her heart, the while, breaking in secret, has been much admired. But princelier still, and more natural, the figure of the patient patriarch, seated at his tent-door, and listening to mes- sage after message of spoil, conflagration, ruin, and death, till, in the course of one curdling hour of agony, he finds himself flockless, serfless, childless, a beggar and a wreck amid all the continued insignia of almost royal magnificence. But his heart breaks not. He does not dash away into the wilderness. He does not throw himself on the ground. He does not tear his white hair in agony. AVith decent and manly sorrow, he in- deed shaves his head, and rends, after the custom of his coun- try, his raiment. But his language is, " Naked came I out of 82 tOETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. my motlier's womb, and naked shall I return tliither ; tlie Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord." From some clime of eternal calm seem those ac- cents to descend. TJie plaints of Prometheus and Lear come from a lower region. The old tree has been sliorn by a swift- running and all-encompassing fire of its ftiir foliage : but it has bent its head in reverence before the whirlwind, ere it passed away. In sculpture, there are a silence and a calm which, in na- ture, are only found in parts and parcels — a stillness within stillness — the hushing of a hush. But not sculpture itself can fully express the look of resignation (as if all calamity were met and subdued by it) which Job's countenance returned to that sky of ruin which suddenly lowered over the tent of his fathers. But, alas ! all calamity was not met and subdued by it. Other griefs were in store, and the iron must enter into his soul. His patient resolve, firm as the "sinew" of leviathan, was at last subdued ; and there broke forth from him that tre- mendous curse, which has made the third chapter of Job dear to all the miserable. Who can forget the figure of Swift, each revolving birthday, retiring into his closet, shutting the door behind him — not to fast or to pray, but to read this chapter, per- haps, with wild sobs of self application ? Nor could even he wring out thus the last drops of its bitterness. It is still a Marah, near which you trace many miserable footsteps ; and never, while misery exists, can its dreary grandeur, its passion for death, the beauty it pours upon the grave, the darkness which, collecting from all glooms and solitudes, it bows down upon the one fatal day of birth, be forgotten. " Let them bless it that curse the day," for surely it is the most piercing cry ever uttered in this world of "lamentations, mourning, and woe." In describing an apparition, as in describing all the other ob- jects collected in his poem, the author of Job has this advantage — his is, so far as we know, the first. " He is the first that ever burst Into that silent sea" POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 83 of shadows, dreams, and all the other fears and marvels of the night. Is it asked, how ought an apparition to be represented? We reply, as it ought to be seen. With a certain preceding con- sciousness, the shadow of the approaching shade, with fear shaking every bone, but ovei"powering no part of the man — with hair shivering, but with eye fixed and strained in piercing intensity of vision — -with the perception of a form without dis- tinct outline, of a motion without sound, of a fixed position without figure, of a voice so faint, " that nothing hves 'twixt it and silence" — with a strange spiritual force from within rising up to bear the burden, and meet the communion of an unearthly presence — and with the passing away of that burden, like the gradual dropping of a load of heavy gloom from the mind ; thus could we conceive a man, bold in spirit, strong in health, and firm in faith, meeting a messenger from the dead. And thus has Eliphaz described his visitor. It is the hour of night. He is alone on his couch. A shudder, like the sigh of a spirit, passes over him. This shudder strengthens till every fiber of his frame shakes. Then he becomes " aware" of the presence and transit of a spiritual being, and every hair on his flesh starts up to do him homage. This motion not heard, stills into a form not seen. In awful balance between matter and spiiit, hangs the dim shade before the strained, yet unmaddened eye. And then a voice, fainter than a whisper, but more distinct, trembling between sound and silence, is heard, " How can man be more just than God, or mortal man more just than his Maker ?" To paint a shade is surely the most difficult of achievements. But here EHphaz seizes, in the inspired glance of one sentence, the middle point vibrating between the two worlds. Xot so suc- cessfully has Milton assayed to set chaos before us, in language jarring and powerful almost as the tumultuous surge it describes, and by images culled from all elements of contradiction, con^ fusion, and unrule. Innumerable since have been the poetical descriptions, as "well as pictorial representations, of ghosts and ghost-scenes. But the majority are either too gross or too shadowy. Some have 84 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. painted their ghosts too minutely ; they have made an inven- tory of a spirit — head, hair, teeth, feet, dress, and all, are lite- rally represented, till our terror sinks into disgust, or explodes into laughter. Thus Monk Lewis describes his fiend, as hoarse with the vapors of hell. Thus, while Shakspeare clothes his ghost with complete steel, an inferior genius since makes the steel of his ghostly warrior red-hot. Others dilute their vapory apparitions till they vanish quite away. One author is deep in the knowledge of panic terror (Brockden Brown). He makes you fear as much in company as alone, as much at noon as at midnight — he separates the shiver of supernatural fear from the consciousness of a supernatural presence, and gives you it en- tire, " hfting the skin from the scalp to the ankles." But this, though a rare power, evades the difficulty of representing a spirit. Perhaps Scott, the painter, and Southey, the poet, have succeeded best : Scott in his Demon of the Cape appearing to Vasco de Gama, and Southey in his famed description of Ar- valan appearing to Kailyal. " A nearer horror met the maiden's view ; For right before her a dim form appeared — A human form in that black night, Distinctly shaped by its own lurid light — Such light as the sickly moon is seen to shed Through spell-raised fogs, a bloody, baleful red. That specter fixed his eyes upon her full ; The light which shone in their accursed orbs "Was like a light from hell, And it grew deeper, kindling with the view. She could not turn her sight From that infernal gaze, which, like a spell. Bound her, and held her rooted to the ground. It palsied every power. Her limbs availed her not in that dread hour ; There was no moviug thence. Tliought, memory, sense, were gone. She heard not now the tiger's nearer cry ; She thought not on her father now ; Her cold heart's-blood ran back ; POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 85 Her hand lay senseless on the bough it clasped ; Her feet were motionless ; Her fascinated eyes, Like the stone eyeballs of a statue, fixed, Yet conscious of the sight that blasted them." This is genius, but genius laboring to be afraid. In Job, it is mere man trembling in the presence of a spiritual power. The moral pictures in Job are even more wonderful, when we consider the period. Society was then a narrow word — a co-. lossal fixture, without play, fluctuation, or fluent, onward motion. From this, you might have expected much sameness in the de- scriptions of character ; and yet there is a great variety. In the several pictures of the misery of the wicked, not only is the imagery almost p)rodigally varied, but there are new traits of character introduced into each. Job's account of the state of his prosperity is famous for redundancy of beautiful figures. It is itself a cornucopia. And how interesting the glimpses given us of the manners and customs of a pastoral and primitive age ! None of the landscapes of Claude Titian or Poussin equal these. "We see ^ "A pastoral people, native there, Who, from the Elysian, soft, and sunny air, Draw the last spirit of the age of gold, Simple and generous, innocent and bold." All that has since occurred on the bustling stage of the vv'orld is forgotten as a dream. That innocent, beautiful hfe seems the only reality. The praise of wisdom must not be overlooked. It is the an- ticipation of an answer to Pilate's question, " What is truth ?" That did not, or at least ought not to have meant, what is the absolu(3 truth of all things ? — a question equivalent to, what is Omniscience ? — but, what is that portion of the universal truth, •what the extract from its volume, which can satisfy the soul, coincide with conscience, give a sense of safety, and form a firm pillow for the bed of death ? 86 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB/ To this question, many insufficient and evasive answers have been returned. Science has sought for truth in fields, and niines, and furnaces — in atoms and in stars — and has found many glittering particles, but not any such lump of pure gold, any such " sum of saving knowledge," as is entitled to the name of the truth. " The sea saith, It is not in me." The truth grows not among the flowers of the field, sparkles not among the gems of the mine ; no crucible can extract it from the fur- nace, no microscope detect it in the depths, and no telescope descry it in the heights of nature. Art, too, has advanced to re- ply. Her votaries have gazed at the loveliness of creation ; they have listened to her voice, they have watched the stately steps of her processes ; and that loveliness they have sought to imitate in painting, those steps to follow in architecture, and those voices to repeat in music and in song. But painting must whisper back to poetry, poetry repeat to music, and music wail out to architecture — " It is not in us." Others, again, have followed a bolder course. Regarding art as trifling, and even science as shallow, they have aspired to enter with philosophy into the springs and secrets of things, and to compel truth herself to answer them from her inmost shrine. But too often, in propor- tion to their ambition, has been their failure. We sickefl as we remember the innumerable attempts which have been made, even by the mightiest minds, to solve the insoluble, to measure the immense, to explain the mysterious. From such have proceeded many cloudy falsehoods, a few checkered gleams, of clear light little, but the truth has still remained afar. " The depth saith. Not in me." Nay, others have, in desperation, plunged, professedly in search of truth, into pleasure or guilt ; they have gone to hell-gate itself, and have asked, Does the truth dwell here ? but destruction and death only say, with hollow laughter, "We have heard the fame of it with our ears." Standing above the prospective wreck of all such abortive replies the author of Job discloses that path which the "vul- ture's eye hath not seen," and the gates of which no golden key -POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 87 can open — " Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is understanding." Simple the finger- post, but it points out the truth. Here, at last, we find that portion of the universal knowledge, truth, or wiodom, which satisfies without cloying the mind — which reflects the inner man of the heart as " face, face in a glass" — which gives a feeling of firm ground below us, firm if there be terra firma in the universe — and on which have reposed, in death, the wisest of mankind. Newton laid not his djing head on his " Prin- cipia," but on his Bible ; Cowper, not on his " Task," but on his Testament; Hall, not on his wide fame, but on his "humble hope ;" Michael Angelo, not on that pencil which alone coped with the grandeurs of the "Judgment," but on that grace which, for him, shore the judgment of its terrors ; Coleridge, not on his limitless genius, but on "Mercy for praise, to be forgiven for fame." Often must the wanderer amid American forests lay his head upon a rude log, while above it is the abyss of stars. Thus the weary, heavy-laden, dying Christian leans upon the rugged and narrow Cross, but looks up the while to the beaming canopy of immortal hfe — to those "things which are above." Calmly does Job propound the great maxim of man, though it might have justified even excess of rapture. Archimedes ran out shouting " Eureka !" Had he found the truth ? No, but only- one golden sand upon the shore of science. Nay, though he had found out all natural knowledge at once ; suppose he had, by one glance of genius, descried the axletree whence shoot out all the spokes of scientific truth — though louder far, in this case, had been his Eureka, and deeper far his joy — would he have found the truth ? No ; it was in the wilderness of Arabia, and to the heart of an holy herdsman, that this inspiration at first came, and no cry of triumph proclaimed its coming, and no echo then reverberated it to the nations. The entrance of the Deity into this poem is the most daring and the most successful of all poetic interventions. God him- self turns the scale of the great argument. The bearing of 88 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. his speech upon the whole scope of the poem fiills afterward to be noted. Meantira.e let us look at the circumstances of his appearance, and at the mode of his utterance. The dis- putants have enveloped themselves in a cloud of words. A whirlwind must now scatter it. They have been looking at the silver and golden sides of the shield ; both must now be blended and lost in the common darkness of the shadow of God. No vehicle for this awful umpire like a whirlwind. We can not paint an oriental whirlwind ; but, some years ago, on a Sabbath afternoon, we saw a spectacle we shall never forget. It was the broad, bright, smothering sunshine of an August day. Not a speck was visible on the heavens, save one in the far south. Suddenly, as w^e gaze, that one speck broadens, darkens, opens into black wings, shuts again into a mass of solid gloom, rushes then, like a chariot of darkness, northward over the sky, till, in less time than we have taken to write these words, there is, over all the visible heaven and earth, the wail of wind, the roar of thunder, the pattering of hail, the foil of rain, the -flash of lightning, and the rushing of swift waters along the ground. " It is a vv'hirlwind !'' we exclaimed, as, like a huge sudden apparition, it seemed to stand up between us and the summer sky. " With God is terrible majesty." From such a car might an angry Deity descend. Out of such a black orchestra might God speak, and all flesh be silent before him. The speech is worthy of the accompaniments and of the speaker. It is a series of questions following each other like claps of thunder. Have our readers never fancied, during a thunder-storm, that each new peal was an ironical question, pro- posed to the conscience from the cloud, and succeeded by a pause of silence more satirical still ? Thus, God from his heaven, while pointing to his gallery of works, rising in climax to leviathan, laughs at the baffled power and wisdom of man ; and terrible is the glory of his snorting nostrils. The " ques- tion" in composition is often as searching and stringent as was the "question" of old in law. Abrupt, jagged, unanswered, it POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 89 gives an idea of the Infinite, sucTi as is given by a bust, or tbe broken limb of a statue. The slight tinge of contempt which mingles with it adds a strange flavor to its interest ; and, when repeated, it sounds like the voice of a warrior, shouting trium- phantly in the ear of his dead, unreplying foeman. So have the masters of writing used it. Demosthenes abounds in what Hall calls those terrible interrogations, by which, after pros- trating his opponents in argument, he proceeds to trample them in the mire — reserving them, however, wisely, for the close of his orations. Barrow pursues some of his longest and finest trains of reasoning in this form. But the great modern master of this impressive inversion of truth is Foster, who never fails, in his "Essays," thus to cite the conscience or the soul to his bar, and cross-examine it amid such silence as the judgment-seat may witness, when a Mary, Queen of Scots, is summoned to put in her plea. In Job, the questions of God form the climax of the poem. You feel that they reach the highest possible point of sublimity ; and the pause which follows is profound as the stilhiess of the grave. The voice even of poetic melody, im- mediately succeeding, had seemed impertinent and feeble. The cry of penitence and humihty, " Behold, I am vile," is alone fit to follow such a burst, and to cleave such a silence. To put suitable language into the mouth of Deity, has gene- rally tasked to straining, or crushed to feebleness, the genius of poets. Homer, indeed, at times, nobly ventriloquizes from the top of Olympus ; but it is ventriloquism — the voice of a man, not of a God — Homer's thunder, not Jove's. Milton, while impersonating God, falls flat ; he peeps and mutters from the dust; he shrinks from seeking to fill up the compass of the Eternal's voice. Adequately to represent God speaking, required not only the highest inspiration, but that the poet had heard, or thought he had heard, his very voice shaping articulate sounds from midnight torrents, from the voices of the wind, from the chambers of the thunder, from the rush of the whirlwind, from the hush of night, and from the breeze of the day. And, doubt- less, the author of Job had had this experience. He had lain on 90 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. his bed at niglit, while his tent was shaking with what seemed the deep syllables of Jehovah's voice. lie had heard God in the waters, unchained by midnight silence, and speaking to the stars. In other nameless and homeless sounds of the wilderness, he had fancied distinct words of counsel or of warning ; and when he came to frame a speech for God, did he not tune it to the rhythm of those well-remembered accents ; and on these, as on wings, did not his soul soar upward into the highest heaven of song ? Some poems have risen to the note of the flute, and others to the swell of the organ ; but this highest reach of poetry rose to the music of the mightiest and oldest elements of nature combining to form the various parts in the one voice of God. And how this whirlwind of poetry, onc^ aroused, storms along — how it ruffles the foundations of the earth — how it churns up the ocean into spray — how it unvails the old treas- ures of the hail and the snow — how it soars up to the stars — how the " lightnings say to it. Here we are" — how, stooping from this pitch, it sweeps over the curious, noble, or terrible creatures of the bard's country, rousing the mane of the lion, stirring the still horror (5f the raven's wing, racing with the wild ass into the wilderness, flying with the eagle and the hawk, shortening speed over the lazy vastness of behemoth, awaken- ing the thunder of the horse's neck, and daring to " open the doors of the face," with the teeth " terrible round about" of leviathan himself! The truth, the literal exactness, the fresh- ness, fire, and rapidity of the figures presented, resemble less the slow, elaborate work of a painter, than a succession of pic- tures, taken instantaneously by the finger of the sun, and true to the smallest articulation of the burning life. The close of the poem, representing Job's renewed prosperity, is in singular contrast with the daring machinery and rich imagery of the rest of the book. It is simple and strange as a nursery tale. By a change as sudden as surprising, the wheel turns completely round. Job rises from the dust ; a golden shower descends, in the form of troops of friends, bringing with them silver and gold ; sheep and oxen, as if rising from the POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 91 eartb, fill his folds ; new sons and daughters are born to him ; the broad tree over his tent blooms and blossoms again ; and long, seated under its shadow, may he look ere he descry other messengers arriving breathless to announce the tidings of other woes. In Blake's illustrations of this book, not the least inter- esting or significant print is that representing the aged patriarch, seated in peace, surrounded by a multitude of singing men and singing women ; camels, sheep, and oxen grazing in the dis- tance ; and, from above, God (an exact likeness of Job) smiling, well-pleased, upon this full-length portrait of the man perfect throuo'h sufferinor — the reconciled man. Perhaps, when Blake himself expired, the true and only key to his marvelous book of Illustrations (less a commentary on Job, than a fine though inferior variation of it) was lost. It were vain to recount the innumerable interpretations of the poem given by more prosaic minds than Blake^s. Our notion has been already indicated. We think Job a dramatic and allegorical representation of the necessity, means, and conse- quences of the reconciliation of man the individual, shadowing out, in dim distance, the reconciliation of man the race on earthy but not, alas ! (as Blake seems to have intended) the recon- ciliation of man the entire species in heaven. The great problem of this world is, How is man to be reconciled, or made at onej with his Maker? He appears, as David describes himself, a "stranger on this earth." All elements, and almost all beings, are at war with him. He has nothing friendly at first, save the warmth of his mother's breast. Rain, cold, snow, even sunshine, beasts, and men, seem and are stern and harsh to his infant feelings and frame. As he advances, his companions, his school- masters, are, or appear to be, renewed forms of enmity. " What have I done to provoke such universal alienation ?" is often his silent, suppressed feeling. The truths of art, science, nay, of God's word, are presented as if contradicting his first fresh feel- ings. Books, catechisms, schools, churches, he steals into, as if they were strange and foreign countries. At every step, he breathes a diflScult air. Sustained, indeed, by the buoyant 92 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. spirits of youth, he contrives to be cheerful amid his difficulties ; but at last the " Death-in-life" appears in his path — the dread- ful question arises, " Must there not be something in me to pro- voke all this enmity ? Were / a different being, would to me every step seem a stumble, every flower a weed, every brow a frown, every path an inclosure, every bright day a gaud, every dark day a faithful reflector of misery, every hope a fear, and every fear the mask for some unknown and direr horror ? If it is not the universe, but I, that am dark, whence comes in me the shadow which so beclouds it ? Whence^ comes it, that I do not partake either of its active happiness, or of its passive peace ? And seeing that the universe is unreconciled to me, and I to the universe, must it not be the same with its God, and who or what is to bridge across the gulf betwixt him and me ? If a finite creation repels me,- how can I face the justice of an infinite God ? If time present me with little else than difficulties, what dangers and terrors may lurk in the heights and depths of eter- nity ? If often the wicked are prosperous and contented on earth, and the good afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not com- forted, may not similar anomalies abound hereafter? And how am I to be convinced that a system so strange as that around me is wise — that sufferings are salutary, and that its God is good? And how, above all, is my personal unworthiness to be removed ? Su h is a general statement of the common difficulty. In various men it assumes various forms. In one man, a gloomy temperament so poisons all the avenues of his being, that to tell him to be happy and to worship, sounds at first as absurd as though you were giving the same counsel to one burning in a conflagration. Another is so spell-bound by the spectacle of moral evil, that he is able to do or say little else than ask the question — " Whence and what art thou, execrable shape ?" A third, sincere almost to lunacy, is driven doubly '* mad for the sight of his eyes which he doth see" — the sight of a world, as hollow in heart as some think it to be in physical structure. A fourth has his peace strangled by doubts as to the peculiar doc- POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 93 trines, or as to the evidences of liis faith — doubts of a kind which go not out even by prayer and fasting. And a fifth, of pure life and benevolent disposition, becomes a mere target for the arrows of misfortune — at once a prodigy of excellence and a proverb of woe. This last case is that of Job, and, perhaps, of those now enumerated, the only one then very likely. But the resolution of the difficulty he obtained applies to all the others unrecon- ciled — it ought to satisfy them. How was Job instructed ? By being taught — first, in part through suflfering, and, secondly, through a manifestation of God's superiority to him — a child- like trust in God. Even amid his wailings of woe, he had fal- teringly expressed this feeling — " Though he slay me, I will trust in him." Bat when he saw and ielt God's greatness, as expounded by himself, he reasoned thus : One so great must be good — one so wise must mean me well by all my afflictions. I will distrust and doubt him no more. I will loathe myself on account of my imperfect and unworthy views of him. I will henceforth confide in the great whole. I will fearlessly commit my bark to the eternal ocean, and, come fair weather or foul, will believe that the wave which dashes, or the wave which drowns, or the wave which wafts to safety, is equally good. I will also repent, in dust and ashes, of my own vile- ness, and trust to forgiveness through the medium of the Great Sacrifice, which the smoke of ray altar feebly symbolizes. Behold in this the outline of our reconciliation. The Creator of this great universe must be good. Books of evidences, be- gone ! One sunset, one moonhght hour, one solemn meditation of the night, one conversation at evening with a kindred heart, is worth you all ! Such scenes, such moments, dissolve the most massive doubts easily and speedily as the evening air sucks down the mimic mountains of vapor which He along the verge of heaven. The sense given is but that, indeed, of beauty and power — transcendent beauty, and power illimitable ; but is there not insinuated something more — a lesson of love as tran- scendent, and of peace as boundless ? Does not the blue sky 04 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. give US an unutterable sense of security and of unioi ', ( ('j\h around us, like the curtain of a tent ? Do not the utars dart down glances of warm intelligence and affection, secret and real as the looks of lovers ? Do not tears, torments, evils, and death, seem at times to melt and disappear in that gush of golden glory, in that stream of starry hope which the milky-way pours each night through the heavens ? Say not with Carlyle, " It is a sad sight." Sad ! the sight of beauty, splendor, order, motion, progress, power. Godhead — how can it be sad ? Man, indeed, must at present weep as well as wonder, as he looks above. Be it so. We have seen a child weeping bit- terly on his mother's knee, while the train was carrying him triumphantly on. "Poor child!" we thought, "why weepest thou ? Thy mother's arms are around thee, thy mother's eye is jQxed upon thee, and that bustle and rapidity, so strange and dreadful to thee, are but carrying thee faster to thy home." Thus man wails and cries, with God above, God around, God below, and God before him. Not always shall he thus weep. But other elements are still wanting in his reconciliation. It is not necessary merely that power, beautj^, and wisdom lead to the conception of God's goodness and love, but that suffering, by perfecting patience, by teaching knowledge, should, while humbling man's pride, elevate his position, and put into his hands the most powerful of all telescopes — that of a tear. " Perfect through suffering" must man become ; and, then, how do all apparent enemies soften into friends ! how drop down all disguises ; and misfortunes, losses, fevers, falls, deaths, stand out naked, detected, and blushing lovers. One thing more, and the atonement is complete. Man has about him another burden besides that of misery — it is a bur- den of sin. To this he can not be reconciled. This must be taken away ere he can be perfectly at one with the universe or its Maker. This, by the great sacrifice at Calvary, and the sanctifying power of the Spirit, has been taken away ; and now, whoever, convinced of God's benevolence by the voice of his own soul echoing the language of the creation — satisfied, POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB. 95 from experience, of the benefits of suflfering — is also forgiven, through Christ, his iniquities, stands forth to view the recon- ciled man. Be he of dark disposition, his gloom is now tem- pered, if not removed ; he looks at it as the pardoned captive at his iron bars the last evening of his imprisonment. Be he profoundly fascinated by moral evil, even with its dark counte- nance, a certain morning twilight begins to mingle. Has he been sick of the hoilowness of the world, now he feels that that very hoilowness secures its exj^losion — it must give place to a truer system. Has he entertained doubts — he drowns them in atoning blood. Has he suffered — his sufferings have left on the soil of his mind a rich deposit, whence are ready to spring the blossoms of Eden, and to shine the colors of heaven. Thus reconciled, how high his attitude, how dignified his bearing ! He knows not what it is to fear. Having become the friend of God, he can look above and around him with the eye of univer- sal friendship. In the blue sky he dwells, as in a warm nest. The clouds and mountains seem ranged around him, like the chariots and horses of fire about the ancient prophet. The roar of wickedness itself, from the twilight city, is attuned into a melody, the hoarse beginning of a future anthem. Flowers bloom on every dunghill — light gushes from every gloom — the grave itself smiles up in his face — and his own frame, even if decaying, is the loosened and trembling leash which, when broken, shall let his spirit spring forth, free and exulting, amid the liberties, the hght, the splendors, and the " powers of the world to come." * * The author means, if God spare him, to develop further his views of the reconciliation of man, in another, and probably a fictitious form. CHAPTER VI. POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. The entire history of Israel is poetical and romantic. Besides the leading and wide events we have already indicated, as nour- ishing the spirit of Hebrew poetry — such as the creation, the flood, the scene at Sinai — there were numerous minor sources of poetic influence. The death of Moses in the sight of the promised land ; the crossing of the river Jordan ; the wars of Canaan ; the romantic feats of Samson ; the immolation of Jophtha's daughter, the Iphigenia of Israel ; the story of Ruth, "standing amid the alien corn," with all its simplicity and pathos ; the rise of David, harp in hand, from " the ewes with young," to the throne of his country ; his adventurous, checkered, and most poetical his- tory ; the erection of the temple, that fair poem of God's ; the separation of the tribes ; the history and ascent of Elijah ; the calling of Elisha from the plow ; the downfall of the temple ; the captivity of Babylon ; the return from it ; the rise of the new temple, amid the tears of the old men, who had seen the glories of the former — these, and many others, were events which, touching again and again, at short and frequent inter- vals, the rock of the Hebrew heart, brought out another and another gush of poetry. We speak not now of David's Psalms, or those which fol- lowed his time, but of those songs which are sprinkled through the historical works of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel (inclusive of one or two of David's strains), and which shine as sparkles struck off from the rolling wheel of Jewish story. It is beau- POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 97 tiful to see history thus flowering into poetry — the heroic deed living in the heroic la)^ — the glory of the field, separated from its gore, purified, and, like the ever-burning fire of the temple, set before the Lord of Hosts. What Macaulay's " Lays of Ancient Rome" have done for the fabulous legends and half- true traditions of ancient story, have Jasher, Iddo, Deborah, and David, in a higher and holier manner, done for the real battles and miracles which stud the annals of God's chosen people. Need we refer to the grand myth — if such it be — of the standing still of the sun over Gibeon, and of the moon over the valley of Ajalon. Supposing this literally true, v.hat a picture of the power of mind over matter — of inspired mind over pas- sive matter! The one word of the believing roan has arrested the course of nature. His stern commanding eye has enlisted the very sun into his service, and the moon seems a device upon his banner. It is a striking verification of the words, " All things are possible to him that believeth." That matter which yields reluctantly to the generalizations of science, is plastic, as soft clay, in the hands of faith. Suns and systems dance to the music of the throbs from a great heart. Should we, on the contrary, suppose this a poetical parable, and thus rid ourselves of the physical difficulties, how grandly does it express modern experiences ! Has not man, through astronomy, made the sun stand still, and the earth revolve ? Did not the genius of Napoleon arrest the sun of Austerlitz, for many a summer, over his fields of slain ? Is not each extension of the power of the telescope, causing firmaments to yield, to recede, to draw near, to dissolve, to curdle, to stand, to move, to assume ten thousand various forms, colors, and dimensions ? Is not man each year feeling himself more at home in his house, more at hberty to range through its remoter apartments, with more command over its elements, and with a growing consciousness, that his empire shall yet be complete ? Joshua commanding the sun and the moon, is but an emblem of the man of the future, turning and winding the universe, like a "fiery Pega- sus," below him, on his upward and forward career. E 98 POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. Deborali — what a strong solitary ray of light strikes from her story and song, upon the peaks of the past ! A mother in Israel, the wise woman of her neighborhood, curing diseases, deciding differences, perhaps, at times, conducting the devotions of her people — how little was she, or were they, aware of the depth which lay in her heart and in her genius. It required but one action and one strain to cover her with glory. In her, as in all true women, lay a quiet fmid of strength, virtue, and courage, totally unsuspected by herself. While others won- dered at her sudden patriotism and poetry, she wondered more than they. The Great Spirit, seeking for a vent through which to pour a flood of ruin upon the invaders of Israel, found this woman sitting under her palm-tree, on the mountain side, and she started up at his bidding. " I, Deborah, arose." The calm matron becomes the Nemesis of her race, the mantle of Miriam falls on her shoulders, and the sword of Joshua flames from her hand. This prophetic fury sinks not, till the enemy of her coun- try is crushed, and till she has told the tidings to earth, to heaven, and to all after-time. And then, like a sword dropped from a hero's side, she quietly ftiUs back into her peaceful soli- tude again. It is Cincinnatus resuming his plow-handle in mid-furrow. How wonderful are those gusts which surprise and uplift men, and women too, into greatness — a greatness befora unknown, and terrible even to themselves. In her song the poetry of war comes to its culmination. Not the hoofs of many horses, running to battle, produce such a martial music, as do her prancing words. How she rolls the fine vesture of her song in blood ! How she dares to hken her doings to the thunder-shod steps of the God of Sinai ! The Bong begins with God, and with God it ends. One glance — no more — is given to the desolations which preceded her rising. Praises, like sunbeams, are made to fall on the crests of those who periled themselves with her, in the high places of the field. Questions of forked lightning are flung at the recreant tribes. " Why did Dan abide in ships ?" Ah ! Dan was a ser- pent in the way, biting the horse-heels, and causing the rider POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 99 to fall backward ; but here be is stung and stumbled himself ! Over one village, Meroz, she pauses to pour the concentra- tion of her ire, and the " curse causeless doth not come." For the brave, the light of Goshen ; for the recreants, the night of Egypt ; but for the neutral, the gloom of Gehenna ! " All power," then, " is given her," to paint the battle itself ; and it, and all its scenery, from the stars above fighting against Sisera, to the river Kishon below, that " ancient river," rolling away in indignation the last relics of the enemy, appear before us. Then her imagination pursues the solitary Sisera, unhelmed, pale, and panting, to the tent of Heber, and with a yet firmer nerve, and a yet holier hypocrisy, she re-enacts the part of Jael, and slays again her slain. And then, half in triumph, and half in the ten- derness which often mingles with it, she sees the mother of Sisera looking out at her window, with the flush of hope on her cheek fading into the deathlike paleness of a mother's disappointment and a mother's anguish ; and then — for Deborah, too, is a " mother in Israel" — she can no more, she shuts the scene, she drops the lattice, and her voice fiilters, though her faith is firm, as she exclaims, "So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord; but let them that love him be as the sun, when he goeth forth in his might." It is a baptized sword which Deborah bears. It is a battle of the Lord which she fights. It is a defensive warfare that her song hallows. "Carnage," says Wordsworth, "is God's daughter." We reverenced and loved the Poet of the Lakes, whose genius was an honor to his species, and whose hfe was an honor to his genius ; but seldom has a poet written words more mischievous, untrue, and (unintentionally) blasphemous, than these. We all remember Byron's inference from it, " If Carnage be God's daughter, she must be Christ's sister." Blas- phemous ! but the blasphemy is Wordsworth's, not Byron's. Here the skeptic becomes the Christian, and the Christian the blasphemer. If Carnage be God's daughter, so must evil and sin be. Xo, blessed be the name of our God ! He does not smile above the ruin of smoking towns ; he does not snufF up 100 POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. ■ the blood of a Borodino, or a Waterloo, as a dark incense; he does not say, over a shell-split fortress, or over the dying decks of a hundred dismasted vessels, driftins: down the tremblins* water on the eve of a day of carnage, " It is very good ;" he is the Prince of Peace, and his reign, when universal, shall be the reign of universal brotherhood. And yet, we will grant to Carnage a ro]/al origin : she is, if not the daughter of our God, yet of a god, of the ffod of this world. But shame to those who would lay down the bloody burden at the door of the house of the God of Mercy — a door which has opened to many an orphan and many a foundling, but which will not admit this forlorn child of hell. Never did genius more degrade herself than when gilding the fields and consecrating the banners of unjust or equivocal war. Here, the gift of Scott himself resembles an eagle's feather, trans- ferred from the free vnng of the royal bird to the cap of some brutal chieftain. The sun and the stars must lend their light to the worst atrocities of the battle-field, but surely genius is not bound by the same compulsion. De Quincey has lately predicted the immortality of war : we answer him in the lan- guage of a book, the authority of which he acknowledges, Neither shall they learn ivar any more. Between the time of Deborah and David, w^e find little express poetry. One fable there is, that of Jotham — "the Trees choos- ing a king" — besides the all-beautiful book of Ruth. The first fable, as the first disguise assumed by Truth, must be interesting. Since Jotham uttered the fierce moral of his parable, and fled for his fife, in what a number of shapes has Truth sought for refuge, safety, decoration, point, or j^ower ! Hid by him in trees, she has afterward lurked in flowers, spoken in animals, surged in waves, soared in clouds, burned over the nations in suns and stars, ventriloquized from mines below and from mountains above, created other worlds for her escape, and, when hunted back to the family of mankind, has made a thou- sand new variations of the human species, as disguises for her shy and tremulous self! Whence this strange evasiveness ? It POETRY OF THE H/.S1>0^I0AI. IjClOK^ lOl is partly because Truth, like all her true friend?, loves to un- bend and disport herself at times ; because Truth herself is but a child, and has not yet put away all childish things ; because Truth is a beauty, and loves, as^ the beautiful do, to look at and show herself in a multitude of mirrors ; because Truth is a lover of nature, and of all lovely things ; because Truth, who can only stammer in the language of abstractions, can speak in the language of forms ; because Truth is a fugitive, and in dan- ger, and must hide in many a bosky borne and many a shady arbor; because Truth, in her turn, is dangerous, and must not show herself entire, else the first look were the last ; and be- cause Truth would beckon us on, by her very bashfulness, to follow after her, to her own land, where she may still continue to hide ia heaven, as she has hid in earth — but amid forests, and behind shades of scenery so colossal, that it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive thereof And seldom (to look a little back in the narrative) did Truth assume a quainter disguise, than when she spoke from the lips of Balaam, the son of Beor. Inclined as we are, with Herder, to assign to his prophecies a somewhat later date than is usually supposed, we do not for that reason deny their authenticity or genuineness. They bring before us the image of the first god- less poet — the first who " profaned the God-given strength, and marred the • lofty line." Having been, perhaps, at first a true prophet, and a genius, he had become a soothsayer, but was surprised and forced into a true prophet again. His words come forth from his lips, like honey from the carcass of the lion — " meat fi'om the eater." We figure him always with gray hair and a Danton visage ; the brow lofty and broad ; the eye small, leering, fierce ; the lips large and protruding. Poetry has often lighted on a point so tempting as that rock-like brow ; licen- tiousness has blanched his hair, and many sins and abominations are expressed in his lower face. But look how the Spirit of the Lord now covers him with an unusual and mighty afflatus — how he struggles against it as against a shirt of poison, but in vain —how his eye at length steadies sullenly into vision — and how 16^ POET#-Y bF tHE' HISTORICAL BOOKS, his lips, after writhing, as though scorched, open their wide and slow portals to utter the blessing. He feels himself — eye, brow, soul, all but heart — caught in the power of a mighty one ; and he must speak or burn ! As it is, the blessing blisters his tongue, like a curse, and he has found only its utterance a milder misery. Beautiful, notwithstanding Balaam, is the scene in Numbers. It is the top of Pisgah, where the feet of Moses are soon to stand in death. But now seven altars are sending up the crackling smoke of their burnt-offerings — the fat of bullocks and rams has been transmuted into a rich and far-seen flame — Balak and the Princes of Moab surround the sacrifices, and gaze anxiously upon the troubled face of the seer ; while around stand up, grim and silent, as if waiting the result. Mounts Nebo and Peor ; behind stretches the Land of Promise, from the Dead Sea to the Lebanon ; and before are the white tents, the Tabernacle, and the bright cloud, suspended, vail-hke and vast, over the camp of Israel. " 'Twere worth ten years of peaceful life one glance of that array." The soul of Balaam, the poet, rises to his lips, but would linger long there, or come forth only in the fury of curse, did not the whisper of God at the same moment touch his spirit ; and how his genius springs to that spur. To his excited imagination, the bright finger of the cloud over the camp seems the horn of a " unicorn ;" the camp itself, couching in the valley, is a " great lion," waiting to rear himself, to drink the blood of the slain ; no " divination" can move that finger pointing to Canaan and to Moab ; no " en- chantment" can chain that " Lion of the tribe of Judah." It is over — he drops his rod of imprecation, and to the crest-fallen Princes exclaims — " God hath blessed, and I can not reverse it^ From point to point he is taken, but, even as his ass was waylaid at every step by the angel, so is his evil genius met and rebuked under a better spirit, till each mount in all that high range becomes a separate source of blessing to the " people dwelling alone, and not reckoned among the nations." Trem- bling in the memory and the remaining force of the vision, the POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 103 prophet at lerigtli pursues eastward his solitary journey, and, trembling in the terror of Israel, Balak also goes his way. Genius has indeed a hard task to perform when she turns, or seeks to turn, against God. In proportion to the resemblance she bears him, is the misery of the rebellion. It is not the clay rising against the potter — it is the sunbeam against the sun. But here, too, we find righteous compensation. Sometimes the parricidal power is palsied in the blow. Thus, Paine found the strong right hand, which in the " Rights of Man" had coped with Burke, shivered, when, in the " Age of Reason," it touched the ark of the Lord. Sometimes, with the blasphemy of the strain, there is blended a wild beauty, or else a mournful discontent, which serves to carry off or to neutralize the evil effect. Shelley, for instance, has made few converts: a sys- tem which kept him so miserable can not make others happy or hopeful — and you cry besides, that very beauty and love of which he raves are vague abstractions, till condensed into a/orm. Others, again, lapped generally in the enjoyment or dream of a sensual paradise, which is often disturbed by the feeling or the fear of a sensuous hell, sometimes through their dream chant fragments of psalms, snatches of holy melodies learned in cWdhood ; or, awakening outright, feel a power over them compelling them to utter the truth of heaven in strains which had too often finned by turn every evil passion of earth ; and, behold, a Burns and Byron, as well as a Saul and a Balaam, are among the 2>rophets. Does their genius thus ex- ercised seem strange as a parable in the mouth of fools ? How stranger far to superior beings must be the spectacle of any species of genius revolting against its own higher nature in re- volting against its God ! Let then Balaam, the son of Beor, pass on toward the moun- tains of the East. We follow him with mingled emotions of disgust and admiration, fear and pity — pity, for the sword is already trembling over his head ; he who conspired not with Moab shall soon conspire with Midian, and shall perish in the attempt. It is but one lucid peak in his history that we see — 104 POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. all behind and before is darkness; nor can we expect for liim even the tremendous blessing — " Therefore eternal silence he his doomr In the First Book of Samuel, we find at least three specimens of distinct poetry — the ode or thanksgiving, the satire, and the ghost scene. The first is the song of H^mah. This is in- teresting, principally, as the finest utterance of the general desire for children which existed in Jewish females, and which exists in females still. Vv^e deduce from this not merely the inference that the Jews expected a Messiah, but also that there is in human hearts a yearning after a nobler shape of humanity, and that this yearning is itself a proof of its prophecy, and of the permanence and progressive advancement of that race which, notwithstanding ages of anguish and disappointment, con- tinues to thirst for and to expect its own apotheosis. And are not all after- satire and invective against monarchy and kings condensed in Samuel's picture of the approaching " King Stork" of Israel ? We quote it entire : — " And this will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you : He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands,4lnd captains over fifties ; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instru- ments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioneries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive-yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your men-servants, and your maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep ; and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you ; and the Lord will not hear you in that day." What a quiet, refreshing vein of sarcasm enlivens the POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 103 stern truth of this passage. Sheep and asses are the last and least viclims to the royal vulture — men and women are his favorite quarry. Ere coming to the Cave of Endor, we must glance at the actors in the celebrated scene. The first is Samuel, who had been brought up in Hannah's hand to the Temple service — who had, with his curling locks and " little coat," eagerly officiated as a young priest there — who had been awakened at midnight by the voice of God — through whose little throat came accents of divine wrath which stunned Eh's heart, and made the flesh-hooks of his sons trem.- ble amid their sacrilege — who stood behind the smoke of the sacrifice of a sucking lamb, with his hands uplifted to heaven, while behind were his cowering countrymen ; before, the army of the Philistines ; and above, a blue sky, which gradually darkened into tempest, thunder, dismay, and destruction to the invaders — who anointed Saul — who hewed Agag in pieces — who entered amazed Bethlehem like a God, and, neglecting the tall sons of Jesse, chose David, the fair-haired and blooming- child of o-enius — who ao-ain, at Gilo-al, summoned the liojht- nings, which said to him, " Here we are" — and who, at last, was buried in Ramah, his own city, with but one mourner — all Israel, which " rose and buried him." Son of the barren woman, consecrated to God from thy birth, "king of kings," lord of thunders, how can even the strong grave secure thee ? Nay, ere it fully can, thou must look up from below once mora to perform another act of king-quelling power. The second actor in the scene is Saul, whose character is more complex in its elements. Indolent, yet capable of great exertion ; selfish, yet with sparks of generosity ; fitful in tem- per, vindictive in disposition, confusedly brave, irregularly lib- eral, melancholy — mad, Avithout genius, possessed of strong attachments, stronger hatreds and jealousies,' neither a tyrant nor a good prince, neither thoroughly bad nor good, whom you neither can " bless nor ban," he is one of the nondescripts of history. He reminds us most of the gloomy tyrant of Scotland E* 106 POETRT OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. — Macbeth. Like him, he has risen from a lower station ; like him, he has cemented his tottering throne by blood ; hke him, he is possessed by an evil spirit, though, in Saul's case, it does not take the form of a wife-fiend ; hke him, too, he is desper- ate — the Philistines are upon him — David is at a distance- Samuel sleeps in Ramah — God has refused to answer him by prophets, or Urim, or dreams ; and he must now, like Macbeth in his extremity, go and knock at the door of hell. The third actor is the witch of Endor. A borderer between earth and hell, her qualities are rather those of the former than of the latter. She has little weird or haggard grandeur. So far as we can apprehend her, she was a vulgar conjurer, herself taken by surprise, and caught in her own snare. She owns (if we may compare a fictitious with a real person) little kindred to the witches of " Macbeth," with their faces faded and their raiment withered in the infernal fire ; their supernatural age and ugliness ; the wild mirth which mingles with their malice ; the light, dancing measure to which their strains are set, and which adds greatly to their horror, as though a sentence of death were given forth in doggerel ; the odd gusto with which they handle and enumerate all unclean and abominable things ; the strange sympathy with which they may almost be said to fancy their victims ; their dream-like conveyance ; the new and complete mythology with which they are allied ; and the uncer- tainty in which you are left as to their nature, origin, and his- torj' ; — nor to those of Scott and Burns, who are just malicious old Scotch hags, corrupted into witches. Such are the actors. How striking the scene ! We must figure for ourselves the Avitch's place of abode. The shadows of night are resting on Mount Tabor. Four miles south of it, lies, near Endor, a ravine deep sunk and wooded. It is a dreary and deserted spot, hedged round by a circle of evil rumors, through which nothing but despair dare penetrate. But there a torrent wails to the moon, and the moon smiles lovingly to the torrent ; and thick jungle, starred at times by the eyes of fierce animals, conceals this wild amour ; and there stands the hut of the hag, POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. lOV near which you descry a shed for cattle, which have been, or have been bought by, the wages of her imposture. A knock is heard at her door ; and, starting instantly from the thin sleep of guilt, she opens it, after arousing her accomplices. Three men, disguised, but not so deeply as to disguise from her ex- perienced eye the features of lurid fear and ferocity, ask to be, and are, admitted. One, taller, by the head and shoulders, than the rest, opens, in gloomy tones, the gloomy interview, and asks her to bring up whom he should name. Not suspecting this to be Saul — and yet, to whom else could belong that towering stature, that martial form, and the high yet hurried accents of that king-like misery ? — she reminds him that Saul had cut off all that had familiar spirits from the land, and that this might be a snare set for her life. Stung, it may be, at this allusion to one of his few good deeds, in hot and hasty terms, he sw^ears to secure her safety. The woman, satisfied, asks whom she is to invoke, trusting, probably, to sleight-of-hand, on her part or her accomplices', to deceive the stranger. He cries aloud for Samuel — the once hated, the now greatly desired, even in his shroud — and while he is yet speaking, his prayer is answered. Samuel, upraising himself through the ground, is seen by the woman. Horrified at the unexpected sight, and discovering, at the same moment, the identity of Saul, she bursts into wild shrieks — " Thou art Saul !" Slowly shaping into distinct form, and curdling into prophetic costume, from the first vague and indefinite shade, appears an " old man covered with a mantle." It is "Samuel even himself." The grave has yielded to the whisper of Omnipotence, and to the cry of de- spair. Fixing his eye upon the cowering and bending Saul, he asks the reason of this summons. Saul owns his extremity ; and then the ghost, slow disappearing, as he had slowly risen, seems to melt down into those awful accents, which fall upon Saul's ear as " blood mingled with fire," and which leave him a mere molten residuum of their power upon the ground — " To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me" — shadows in a world where the " light is as darkness." " Then fell Saul 108 POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. along the eartli" — a giant chilled and prostrated by a vapor. And how similar the comfort offered through the witch of Endor to the fallen monarch of Israel to the dance of Macbeth's in- fernal comforters ? Shakspeare must have had Endor in his eye : ** Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprigbts, And show the best of our delights ; I'll charm the air to give a sound, While you perform your antique round ; That this great king may kindly say, Our duties did his welcome pay." To this dance, performed to cheer the cheerless, we may liken the calf, killed in haste, and in haste eaten, by one who shall never partake another meal. But here Macbeth rises above his prototype. He drinks the " wildflower wine" of destiny — goes forth enlarged by the draught — and at last dies in broad battle, ■with bis harness on his back ; Avhereas, Saul perishes on the morrow, by his own hand. And who was his chief mourner? Who sung his threnody — a threnody the noblest ever pung by poet over king ? It was a laureate whom his death had elected to the office — it was David. His " Song of the Bow" — which he taught to Israel, till it became such a household word of national sorrow as the "Flowers of the Forest" among ourselves — is one of the short- est as well as sweetest of lyrics. It is but one gasp of genius, and yet remains musical in the world's ear to this hour. It is difficult, by a single stroke upon the groat heart of man, to pro- duce a sound which shall reverberate till it mingle with the last trump ; and yet, this did David in Ziklag. On a wild torn leaf floating past him, he recorded his anguish ; and that leaf, as if all the dew denied to the hills of Gilboa had rested on it, is still fresh with immortality. "How are the mighty fallen ;" "tell it not in Gath ;" " they were lovely in their lives, and in their death not divided ;" " thy love to ine was wonderful, passing the love of women" — these touches of nature, and accents of music, have come down to us entire, as if all the elements had conspired POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 109 that such sounds should never perish. A lesson to all who write or speak ! Speak from the inmost hearty and your word, though as little, is as safe, as Moses in his ark of bulrushes. Unseen hands are stretched forth from all sides to receive and to guard it. It becomes a part of the indestructible essence of things. The poet's name may perish ; or, though it remain, may repre- sent no intelligible character ; but the " Flowers of the Forest" and " Donocht-head" must be sung and wept over while^the earth endure th. Grasp, though it were with your finger, the horns of nature's altar, and you shall never be torn away. Let the world be ever so hurried in her transition from age to age, she never can forget to carry her least household gods along with her. The picture in this "Bow Song" is perfect in its simplicity. On the high places of their last field stand Saul and Jonathan, soon to be twins in death. Swifter are they than eagles, and stronger than lions. Beautiful are their feet upon the moun- tains. Courage gleams in the eyes of both ; but in Saul it is the cotirage of despair. The scene of Endor still swims before his view, and the mantle of Samuel darkens the day. The battle is joined. The Philistines press his army sore. Jona- than is slain before his eyes. Young, strong, and beautiful, he yields to a stronger than he. Saul himself is wounded by the archers. The giant totters toward the ground, which is already wet with his blood. Feeling his fate inevitable, he asks his armor-bearer to save, by slaying him, from the hands of the uncircumcised. He refuses — the unfortunate throws himself on his ow^n sv/ord, and you hear him crying with his final breath — " Not the Philistines, but thou, unquiet spirit of Ramah, hast overcome me." From the hills of Gilboa, the iraaginatioa of David leaps to Gath, and hears the shout with which the tidings of the king's death are received there. But there mingles ■with it, in his ear, a softer, yet more painful sound. It is the wail of Israel's women, almost forgetting their individual losses in that of Saul, their stately monarch, and Jonathan, his in- genuous son. And how do years of ordinary sorrow seem 110 POETHY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. collected in the words which had long struggled obscurely in David's bosom, and often trembled on his lips, but never been expressed till now, when, in the valley of the shadow of death, friendship became a name too feeble for his feelings — "My brother Jonathan 1" If death dissolves dear relationships, it also creates others dearer still. Then, possibly, for the first time, the brother becomes a friend ; but then also the friend is often felt to be more than a brother. But we may not tarry longer on these dark and dewless hills. We pass to that hold in the wilderness, which David has not yet, but is soon to quit, for a capital and a throne. A sentence makes that hold visible, as if set in fire : — " And of the Gadites, there separated themselves unto David into the. hold in the wilderness, men of might, and men of war for the battle, that could handle shield and buckler, whose faces were like the faces of lions, and were as swift as the roes upon the mountains." "There is," says Aird, "an Ihad of heroes in these simple words. Suppose David had his harp in his hand, in the hold, and worshiped with his warriors the God of Israel (in light introduced from the top of the cave), what a picture for Salvator or Rembrandt ; or, rather, the whole effect is beyond the reach of the pictorial art. The visages and shapes, majestic in light and shadow, in that rock-ribbed den, could be given on the canvas, but nothing save the plastic power of poetry could lighten the darkly-congregated and pro- scribed cave, with the sweet contrasted relief of the wild roes without, unbeleaguered and free, on the green range of the un- molested hills. The verse is a perfect poem." The mulberry-trees next arise before us, surmounting the valley of Rephaim. In themselves, there is little poetrj^ But on their summits you now hear a sound, the sound of " a going" — mysterious, for not a breath of wind is in the sky ; it is the " going" of invisible footsteps, sounding a signal from God to David to press his enemies hard. We have often realized the image, as we listened to the wind, of innumerable tiny footsteps treading upon the leaves, their minute, incessant, POETRY 01' THE HISTORICAL BOOKS, HI measured, yet rapid dance. It seemed at once music and dan- cing ; and, had it ceased in an instant, would have reminded you of the sudden silence of a ball-room, which a flash of lightning had entered. It struck the soul of Burns, who, perhaps, heard in it the sound of spirits sullenly bending to overwhelming destiny, and found it reflective of his own history. But in the scene at Kephaim, it appeared as if armies were moving along the high tops of the trees ; as, in " Macbeth," the wood began to move. Nature, from her high green places, seemed making common cause against the invader ; and, in the windless waving of the boughs, was heard the cheer of inevitable victory. "Would to God, that, in the silence of the present expectation of the Church, a " going," even as of the stately steps of Divine Majesty, were heard above, to re-assure the timid among the Church's friends, and to abash the stout-hearted among her foes. From the thick of poetical passages and events in the other parts of Jewish history, we select a few — the fewer, that the mountains of prophecy which command at every point the his- tory remain to be scaled. We find in Nathan's parable " a lamb for a burnt-offering," the simj^lest of stories, producing the most tremendous of heart-quakes. No four words in any lan- guage are simpler, and none stronger, than the words, " Thou art the Man." What effect one quiet sentence can produce ! The whispers of the gods, how strong and thrilling ! Nathan, that gentle prophet, becomes surrounded with the grandeur of an apparition, and his words fall like the slow, heavy drops of a thunder-shower. The princely, gallant, and gifted king quails before him ; and how can you recognize the author of the 18th Psalm, with its fervid and resistless rush of words and images, like coals of fire, in that poor prostrate worm, groveling on the ground, and afraid of the eyes of his own servants ? The genius of David remains for the analysis of the next chapter. But we must not omit the darkest and most poetic hour in all his history, when he cast himself into the hands of God rather than of men ; and, when under the fiery sword a©d 112 POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. the menacing angel, we can conceive admiration for the magnifi- cence of the spectacle, contending with terror — his cheek pale, but his eye burning — the king in panic — the poet in transport, and grasping instinctively for a harp he had not to express his high-strung emotions. Lightning pausing ere it strikes — the poison of Pestilence, hung over the " high-viced city" in the sick air — Death, in the fine fiction of Le Sage, coming up to the morning Madrid — must yield to this figure leaning over the devoted city of God, while both earth and heaven seem wait- ing to hear the blow which shall break a silence too painful and profound. Besides Solomon's Proverbs and Poems, there are in his life certain incidents instinct with imagination. The choice of Hercules is a fine apologue, but has not the sublimity or the completeness of the choice of Solomon. Then there are the sublime circumstances of the dedication of the temple ; the pomp of the procession by which the aik was brought up from the City of David to the pi'ouder resting- place his son had prepared ; the assemblage of all Israel to wit- ness the solemnity ; the sacrifice of innumerable sheep and oxen covering the temple and dimming the day with a cloud of fra- grance ; the slow march of the priests, throu^-h the courts and up the stairs of the glorious fabric, till the sanctuary was reached ; the music, which attended the march, peopling every corner and crevice of the building with its voluminous and searching swell ; the moment when the sudden ceasing of the music, in raid-volume, told the people without that the ark was now resting in its "own place;" the louder strain, of cymbals, psalteries, harps, and trumpets, which awoke when the priests returned from the most holy place ; the slow coming down, as if in answer to the signal of the music, of the cloud of the glory of God — a cloud of dusky splendor, at once brighter than day and darker than midnight — the very cloud of Sinai, but with- out its thunders or lightnings ; the music quaking into silence, and the priests throwing themselves on the ground, before the " darkness visible" which fills the whole house, lowerinoj over POETRY OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 113 the foreheads of the bulls of brass, and blackening the waves of the molten sea ; and the august instant when Solomon, trem- bling yet elate, mounts the brazen scaffold, and standing dim- discovered amid a mist of glory, spreads out his hands, and, in the audience of the people, utters that prayer, so worthy of the scene, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth ? Behold, the heaven, and the heaven of heavens can not contain thee, how much less this house that I have builded ?" Surely Solomon here, next to Moses on Sinai, had reached the loftiest ^o/ftY ever permitted to mortal man. But time would fail us even to glance at the numerous re- maining poetical incidents, circumstances, and passages in the historical books. We must omit, reluctantly, the visit of the Empress of Sheba to Sultan Solomon — Micaiah's vision of Raraoth-Gilead, and of what was to befall Israel and its king there — the destruction of Sennacherib and his army, in one night, by the angel of the Lord — the great passover of Josiah — and, besides several incidents, already alluded to as occurring in Ezra and iSTehemiah, the history of Esther — a history so simple, so full of touches of nature and glimpses into character, so divine, without any mention of the name of God. The most impassioned lover is the secret, who never names his mistress. The ocean is not less a worshiper that she mutters not her Maker's name. The sun is mute in his courts of praise. In Esther, God dwells, as the heart in the human frame — not visible, hardly heard, and yet thrilling and burning in every artery and vein. No label proclaims his presence, but the lifa of the book ha^ been all derived from Him. CHAPTEEYII. POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. We have, in tlie previous chapter, rather outshot the period of the Psahiis ; but we must throw out a hne, and take up David, ere we sail further. No character has suffered more than that of David, from all sorts of imperfect appreciation. While some have treated him as a monster of cruelty and lust, classing* him with the JSTeros and Domitians, others have invested him with almost divine immunities, as if we had no more right to ask at him than at God, " AVhat dost thou V — as if his motions had been irre- proachable as those of the wind, and his vengeance inevitable as the thunderbolt. David, in our view of him, was neither a monster nor a deity — neither a bad man nor by any means the highest of Scripture worthies. William Hazlitt has nowhere more disgraced his talents, amid his many offenses, than in a wretched paper in the " Round Table," where he describes David as a crowned spiritual hypocrite, passing from debasing sins to debasing services — debauching Bathsheba, murdering Uriah, and then going to the top of his palace, and singing out his penitence in strains of hollow melody. Paine himself, even in his last putrid state, never uttered a coarser calumny than this. ISTor ever did the pure and lofty spirit of Edward Irving look nobler, and speak in higher tones, than when, in his preface to " Home on the Psalms," he gave a mild, yet stern verdict upon the character of this royal bard — a verdict in which judgment and mercy are both found, but with " mercy rejoicing against judgment." Many years have elapsed since we read that POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 115 paper, and, should our views, now to be given, happen, as we hope, to be found to coincide with it, we must still claim them as our own. We remember little more than its tone and spirit. David was a composite, though not a chaotic, formation. At first, we find him as simple and noble a child of God, nature, and genius, as ever breathed. A shepherd boy, watching now the lambs, and now the stars, his sleep is peradventure haunted by dreams of high enterprise and coming glory, but his days are calm and peaceful as those of the boy in the Valley of Hu- miliation, who carried the herb " heart's-ease" in his bosom, and sang (next to David's own 23d Psalm) the sweetest of all pas- torals, closing with the lines — " Here little, and hereafter, bliss Is best from age to age." And yet this boy had done, even ere he went to the camp of Israel, one deed of " derring-do ;" he had wet his hands in the blood of a hon and a bear. This had given him a modest sense of his own strength, and perhaps begun to circulate a secret thrill of ambition throughout his veins ; and when he obeyed the command of Jesse to repair to his brethren in the host, it might be with a foreboding of triumph, and a smelling of the battle afar off. We can conceive few subjects fitter for picture or poetry, than that of the young David measuring the mass of steel — Goliath — with an eye which mingled in its ray, wonder, eagerness, anger, and "That stern joy which warriors feel In foemen worthy of their steel." A hundred battles looked forth in that lingering, longing, m- satiate glance. Every one knows the result to the giant of Gath: he fell before the smooth sling-stone. The result on David's mind is not quite so evident ; but we think that all the praises and promotion he received, did not materially affect the 116 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. simplicity of Lis habits, or tlie integrity of liis purposes. Nor did, at first, the persecution of Saul much exasperate Lis spirit, balanced as tliat was by the love of Jonathan. But Lis long- continued flight and exile — the insecurity of Lis life, the con- verse Le Lad with " wild men and wild usages" in tLe cave of Adullam and tLe wilderness of ZipL — altLougL they failed in weaning him from his God, or Lis JonatLan, or even Saul — did not fail somevvLat to embitter his generous nature, and to ren- der him less fitted for bearing the prosperity which suddenly brake upon him. More men are prepared for suddenjdeath than for sudden success. Even after he had reached the throne of his father-in-law, there remained long, obscure contests with the remnant of Saul's party, sudden inroads from the Philis- tines, and a sullen, dead resistance on the part of the old heathen inhabitants of the land, to annoy his spirit. And when after- ward Le Lad brought up the ark of the Lord to the city of David — when the Philistines were bridled, the Syrians smitten, the Ammonites chastised, and their city on the point of being taken — from this very pride of place David fell — fell foully — • but fell not forever. From that hour, his life ran on in a cur- rent of disaster checkered with splendid successes ; it was a tract of irregular and ragged glory, tempering at last into a troubled yet beautiful sunset. But all the elements for our judgment of it had been collected by the time that the " matter of Uriah" was fully transacted. A noble nature, stung before its sin, and seared before its time, contending between the whirlpool of passion and the strong, still impulses of poetry and faith, ruling all spirits ex- cej)t his oum, and yet forever seeking to regulate it, too, sincere in all things — in sin and in repentance — butsincerest in repent- ance — often neglecting the special precept, but ever loving the general tenor of the law, unreconciled to his age or circum- stances, and yet always striving after such a reconciliation, harassed by early grief, great temptations, terrible trials in ad- vanced life, and views necessarily dim and imperfect — David, nevertheless, retained to the last his heart, his intellect, his sim- POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. Il7 plicit}'', his devotion — above all, bis sincerity — loved bis God, saw from afar off his Redeemer; and let the man who is " with- out sin," among' his detractors, cast the first stone. His char- acter is checkered^ but the stripes outnumber the stains, and the streaks of light outnumber both. In his life, there is no lurking- place — all is plain ; the heights are mountains — '^ the hills of holiness," where a free spirit walks abroad in singing robes ; the valleys are depths, out of which you hear the voice of a prostrate penitent pleading for mercy, but nothing is, or can be, concealed, since it is God's face which shows both the lights and shadows of the scene. David, if not the greatest or best of inspired men, was certainly one of the most extraordinary. You must try him not, indeed, by divine or angelic comparison ; but if there be any allowance for the aberrations of a tortured, childlike, devout son of genius — if the nobler beasts of the •wilderness themselves will obey a law^, and observe a chronol- ogy, and follow a path of their own, then let the wanderer of Adullam be permitted to enter, or to leave his cave at his own time, and in his own way, seeing that his wanderings were never intended for a map to others, and that those who follow are sure to find that they are aught but ways of pleasantness or of peace to them. David's genius reflects, of course, partially the phases of hia general character. It is a high, bold energy, combining the fire of the warrior and the finer enthusiasm of the lyric poet. This is its general tone, but it undergoes numerous modifica- tions. At one time, it rises into a swell of grandeur, in which the strings of his harp shiver, as if a storm were the harper. Again, it sinks into a deej), solitary plant, like the cry of the bittern in the lonely pool. At a third time, it is a little gush of joy — a mere smile of devout gladness transferred to his strain. Again, it is a quick and earnest cry for deliverance from present danger. Now, his Psalms are fine, general moral- izings, and now they involve heart-searching self-examinations ; now they are prophecies, and now notes of defiance to his ene- mies ; now pastorals, and now bursts of praise. Ere speaking 118 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. of some of them individually, we have a few general remarks to offer :~— First, Few of the Psalms are fancy-pieces, or elaborated from the mind of the poet alone : most are founded upon facts which have newly occurred, whether those facts be distinctly enun- ciated, or only implied. David is flying from Saul, and he strips off a song, as he might a garment, to expedite his flight, or he is in the hold in the wilderness, and he sings a strain to soothe his anxious soul, or he is overtaken and pressed hard by the Philistines, and he makes musical his cry for safety, or he has fallen into a grievous sin, and his penitence blossoms into poetry, or he is sitting forlorn in Gath, while the idolaters around are deriding or denying the Lord God of Israel, and he murmurs to himself the words : " The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," and describes the Lord looking down in anger upon a world lying in wickedness. This, which is common to the Psalms, with much of the other poetry of Scrip- ture, gives an unspeakable freshness, force, and truth to them all. Each flower stands rooted in truth ; the poetry is just fact on fire. We have now what is called "occasional poetry," but the occasions thus recorded are generally small, such as the sight of the first snow-drop, or the reading of a fine novel in romantic circumstances. But suppose a Wallace or a Bruce, a Mina or a Bolivar, a Wellington or a Napoleon, had been writers, and had let oft' in verse the spray of their adventures, successes, escapes, and agonies — suppose we had, from iheir own tongues or pens, Wallace's feelings after Falkirk, or JSTa- poleon's song of Lodi, or his fugitive poetry during the cam- paign of 1814 — these had borne some resemblance to the burning life of David's Psalms. Secondly, We find in them great variety, extending not only to the Psalms as a whole, but as separate compositions. Many of them begin, for instance, with lamentation, and end with rapture, while others reverse this. In some of the shortest, we find all the compass of the gamut described, from the groan to the pean, from the deep self-accusation to the transport of POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 119 gratitude. Hcuce a singular completeness in tliem, and an adaptation to the feelings of those mixed assemblies which were destined to sing them. " Is any merry ? let him sing Psalms ;" but is any melancholy, few of those Psalms close without ex- pressing sympathy with his desolate feelings too. Thirdly, What were the causes of this variety ? It sprang partly from the varying moods of David's mind, which was sin- gularly sensitive in its feelings, and rapid in its transitions from feeling to feehng, and from thought to thought — his life was, and his poetry is, an April day — and partly because, being a prophet, his prophetic insight often comes in to shed the bright smile of his future prospects upon the darkness of his present state. Fourthly, We notice in the Psalms a " more exceeding" simplicity and artlessness, than in the rest of even Scripture poetry. Any current, though it were of blood or of flame, looks less spontaneous than the single spark or blood-drop. Many of the prophetic writings have a force, and swell, and fierceness, approaching to a certain elaboration ; while David's strains distill, like " honey from the rock." The swift succes- sion of his moods is childlike. His raptures of enthusiasm are as brief as they are lofty. Every thing proclaims a primitive age, a primitive country, and a primitive spirit. Such snatches of song, unimpregnated with religion, sung the Caledonian bards in their wildernesses, and the fair-haired Scalds of Den- mark in their galleys. Fifthly, The piety of the Psalms is altogether inexplicable, except on the theory of a peculiar inspiration. The touched spirit of David, whether wandering in the desert, or seated in his own palace ; whether in defeat or victory ; whether in glory or in deep guilt — turns instinctively to heaven. Firmly, with his blood-red hand, he grasps the Book of the Law of his God ! From old promises, as well ns fresh revelations, he extracts the hope, and builds up the image of a coming Redeemer ! It is beautiful especially to see the wanderer of Maon and Engedi, surrounded by the lion-faces of his men — the center of Israel's disaffection, distress, and despair — retiring from their company, 120 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. to pray, in the clefts of the rock ; or, sleepless, amid their sav- age, sleeping forms, and the wild music of their breathing, sino-ino- to his own soul those sacred poems, which have been the life of devotion in every successive age. It is often, after all, to such places, and to such society, that lofty genius, like Salvator's, goes, to extract a desert wealth of inspiration, which is to be found nowhere else. But it is not often that such hard-won spoils are carried home and laid on the altar of God. Sixthly, from all these qualities of the Psalms, arises their exquisite adaptation to the praising purposes, alike of private Christians, of families, and of public assemblies, in every age. We are fiir from denying that other aids to, and expressions of, devotion may be legitimately used ; but David, after all, has been the chief singer of the Church, and the hold in the wilder- ness is still its grand orchestra. Some, indeed, as of old, that are discontented and disgusted with life, may have repaired to it, but there, too, you trace the footsteps of the widow and fatherless. There the stranger, in a strange land, has dried his tears ; and there those of the penitent have been loosened in gracious showers. There, the child has received an early foretaste of the sweetness of the green pastures and still waters of piety. There, the aged has been taught confidence against life or death, in the sure mercies of David ; and there, the darkness of the depressed spirit has been raised up, and away like a cloud on the viewless tongue of the morning wind. But mightier spirits, too, have derived strength from those Hebrew melodies. The soul of the Reformer has vibrated under them to its depths ; and the lone hand of a Luther, holding his banner before the eyes of Europe, has trembled less that it was stretched out to the tune of David's heroic psalms. On them the freed spirit of the martyr has soared aw^ay. And have not destruction and death heard their fame, when, on the brown heaths of Scot- land, the stern lay was lifted up by the persecuted, like a new- drawn sword, and waved flashing before the eyes of the foemen — " In Judah's land, God is well known, "" His name's in Israel great ; POETRY OP THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 121 In Salem is his tabernacle, % In Zion is his seat. There arrows of the bow he brake, The shield, the sword, the war ; More glorious thou than hills of prey, More excellent art far." Wild, holy, tameless strains, how have ye ran down through ages, in which large poems, systems, and religions, have per- ished, firing the souls of poets, kissing the hps of children, smoothing the pillows of the dying, storming the warrior to heroic rage, perfuming the chambers of solitary saints, and clasping into one the hearts and voices of thousands of assem- bled worshipers; tinging many a literature, and finding a home in many a land ; and still ye seem as fresh, and young, and powerful as ever ; yea, preparing for even mightier tri- umphs than when first chanted! Britain, Germany, and America now sing you ; but you must yet awaken the dumb millios of China and Japan. We select two or three of them for particular survey. We have first the 8th Psalm, which, if not one of David's earliest productions, seems, at least, to reflect faithfully his early feel- ings. The boy's feelings, when crystalized by the force of the man's experience, are generally genuine poetry. The moods of youth, when clad in the words of manhood, and directed to its purposes, become " apples of gold, set in a network of silver." The inspiring thought, in this solemn little chant, is that of wonder — the root of all devotion, as well as of all poetry and philosophy. " When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fino-ers — the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained — what is man ?" The point of view he thus assumes is inex- phcable, except on the supposition of his entertaining an ap- proximately true notion of the magnitude of those starry globes. If they had appeared to him only a few hundred bright spangles on the black robe of night, what was there in them so to have dwarfed the earth, with its vast expanse and teeming popuMion ? But David's imagination and faith combined to turn 122 POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. his eye into a telescope — a glimmer of tLe true starry scLemo came like a revelation to his soul ; and, consideriil^ at once the magnitude of the heavenly bodies, and their order, beauty, and luster, he cried out, " What is man ?" This was his first feel- ing ; but it was breathlessly followed by a perception of the exceeding grandeur of man's position in reference to this lower world. " Thou hast made him lord over the works of thy hands below," although these sovereign heavens seem to defy his dominion, and to laugh over his tiny head. It was not permitted even to David to foresee the time when man's strong hand was to draw that sky nearer, like a curtain — when man was to unfold its laws, to predict its revolutions, and to plant the flag of triumph upon its remote pinnacles. Since his eye rested, half in despair, upon that ocean of glory, and since he drew back from it in shuddering admiration, how many bold divers have, from every point of the shore, plunged amid its waters, and what spoils brought home — here the single pearl of a planet, and here the rich coral of a constellation, and here again, the convolulted shell of a firmament — besides, what all have tended to give us, the hope of fairer treasures, of entire argosies of supersolar spoil, till the word of the poet shall be- come true — " Heaven, hast thou secrets ? Man unbares me, I have none." As a proper pendant to the 8th Psalm, we name next the 139th. Here the poet inverts his gaze, from the blaze of suns, to the strange atoms composing his own frame. He stands shuddering over the precipice of himself. Above is the All- enoompassing Spirit, from whom the morning wings can not save, and below, at a deep distance, appears amid the branch- ing forest of his animal frame, so fearfully and wonderfully made, the abyss of his spiritual existence, lying like a dark lake in the midst. How, between mystery and mystery, his mind, his wonder, his very reason, seem to rock hke a little POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 123 boat between the sea and the sky. But speedily does he re- gain his serenity ; when he throws himself, with childlike haste and confidence into the arras of that Fatherly Spirit, and mur- murs in his bosom, " How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God ; how great is the sum of them ;" and looking up at last in his face, cries—" Search me, O Lord. lean not search thee ; I can not search myself; I am overwhelmed by those dreadful depths ; but search me as thou only canst; see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlast- ing." But hark ! the " voice of the Lord is upon the waters." The God of glory thundereth, and it is a powerful voice which Cometh forth from the Lord. No marvel that David's blood is up, and that you see his hand " pav/ing," like Job's war-horse, for the pen of the lightning. The 29Lh Psalm surpasses all descriptions of a thunder-storm, including those of Lucretius, Virgil, and Byron, admirable as all those are. That of Lucretius is a hubbub of matter ; the lightning is a m.ere elemental dis- charge, not a barbed arrow of vengeance ; his system will not permit a powerful personification. Virgil's picture in the Georgics is superb, but has been somewhat vulgarized to our feelings by many imitations, and the old commonplaces about "Father Jove, and his thunderbolts." Byron does not give us that overwhelming sense of unity which is the poetry of a thunder-storm — cloud answers to cloud, and mountain to moun- tain ; it is a brisk and animated controversy in the heavens, but you have not the feeling of all nature bowing below the presence of one avenging Power, with difficulty restrained from breakino; forth to consume — of one voice creating^ the sounds — of one form hardly concealed by the darkness — of one hand grasping the livid reins of the passing chariot — and of one sigh of relief testifying to the feelings of gratitude on the part of nature and of man — when, in the dispersion of the storm, the one mysterious power and presence has passed away. It is the godhood of thunder which the Hebrew poet has expressed, and no other poet has. Like repeated peals, the name of the Lord 124 POETRY OF THE TIOOK OF TSALMS. Rounds down all tlio 20Lli J\srilin, solcnmizini;- and harmonizing it all — " Thu voice of the Lord is upon the waters — the God of glory thundereth ; the Lord breakoth the cedars of Lebanon ; the Lord shakcth the wilderness of Jvadcsh ; the voice of the Lord maketh the liinds to calve, and discovereth the forests ; the Lord siUoth ii]>oii i\n\ Hood ; the Lord will i;-ive strength unto his people ; the JA)rd will bless liis people with peace." Thus are all the j)henouiena of the storm — from the agitated waters of the sea, to the crashing cedars of Lebanon — from the dej)ths of Jiashan's forest, bared to its every fallen leaf, and every ser- pent's hole, in the glare of the lightning, to the premature calv- ing of the Idnd — from the awe of the quaking wikhirncss, to the solemn peace and whispered worship of Cod's people in bis temi)lc — bound together by the name and presence of God as by a chain of living lire, " When Bciencc, from creation's faco, Kiichantinent's vail withdraws, What lovely visioiia yield their place To cold material laws." True, but not merely love/// l)ut dreadful visions recede before the dawn of science ; while the rainbow becomes less beautiful, t^ho thunder becomes less sublime. Jiut this poet seems not to feel, that, when science reaches its noonday, those visions shall return, for, indeed, they are something better than mere visions. The thunder, after all, is the voice of (Jod. Every particle of that tempest is an instant emanation from a present Deity. Analyze electricity as strictly as you can, the question recurs, " What is it, whence comes it ?" and the answer must bo, From an inconceivable, illimitable Tower behind and within those elements — in one word, from (Jod. So that the boy who throws himself down in terror before the black cloud, as before a frown, is wiser than the man of science, who regards it as ho would its picture. So that the devout female who cries out, " there's the power to crusli us, were it but per- mitted," is nearer the truth than the i)ert prater who, amid the POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 125 play of those arrows of God, takes out his watch to calculate their distance, or turns round to prove, according to the doc- trine of chances, that there is httle or no danger. So that the cono;re