the fragmentary and isolated character of the glimpses which they gain into the Eternal secret,—to testify that the riddle of God's Providence is hidden from them, though the spirit of His life is revealed. And while this is the case, while the greatest imaginative beauties of the Hebrew poets have no living imaginative centre or unity of their own, but are used as scattered symbols of spiritual truths which pierce the natural and visible universe at isolated points, rather than harmonize and explain it, it seems almost a mockery to round them off with a rhythm and a rhyme which are the appropriate dress of finished creations. They are greater than other poems from the very same cause which renders them less complete. The plan of the universe was too great a plan to grasp, though here and there it was given to the Hebrew poets to shed upon it a brilliant light. And the fragmentary character of their insight is fitly mirrored in the broken music of our prose versions.

When, indeed, the mind of the poet dwelt directly and exclusively on the spiritual perfection of God, the harmony of his theme ensured a certain imaginative unity in his work. But when, as was more common, it was his effort to afford some glimpse into the mystery of Providence, it was his very aim to maintain that what was visible to the imagination had no independent unity or significance in itself; and then he appealed for the solution of the human drama to the undeclared counsels of God, and affirmed His faith in a heavenly music, inaudible as yet, lurking under the apparent discords of human destiny, but confessed his inability to explain what that music was. And in all such direct appeals from the visible to the invisible,—in all such confessions that the principle of harmony was still undiscovered, that the truth was shrouded in mystery,-the perfect rhythm, which seems to mark the natural march of a visible order and harmony, is far less suitable than the

less measured speech in which all that is incipient or fragmentary in human life finds its natural medium of expression. Even Milton, with true poetic insight, as I think, into this principle, confined his versified renderings of the Psalms to those more strictly devotional outpourings in which the human heart is expressed, rather than those in which the "burden of the mystery" of Divine government is half relieved and half magnified. Is there not something obviously and painfully incongruous, for instance, in any versification of such verses as these, which are deeply impressed with the characteristic genius of Hebrew poetry?—

"Whither shall I go then from thy spirit, or whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there if I go down to hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee: but the night is clear as the day: the darkness and the light to thee are both alike."

To me, the broken harmony of the metre, the absence of rhyme,-in other words, the absence of any affectation of satisfied or adequate imaginative power,-is absolutely essential to portray the insupportable burden of the mystery weighing on the mind of the poet. And it is not so much the deficiency in the art of the following lines, as the attempt at art at all,-the mere effort to run the thoughts of the Psalmist into smooth verse,-which repels me. I quote from a poetical version, made by Mr. Edgar Browning, from the English Prayer-Book of the Book of Psalms :

"Where from thy spirit shall I go? where from thy presence hide?
Climb I to heaven, thou'rt there; or go to hell, thou'rt by my side.
If morning's wings I take, and dwell beside the farthest sea,
E'en there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand succour me.

If peradventure I should say, The darkness shall surround me,
Then shall my night be turned to day, and utterly confound me.
No darkness darkness is with thee: as clear as day is night;
For unto thee alike appear the darkness and the light."

I wonder the mere attempt to rhyme such thoughts as these did not at once convince any one who made the attempt, that there is no discord like that which fastens outward symbols of artistic unity on those heavings of elemental thought which are expressly confessed as utterly beyond the control of the thinker. To rhyme the thunders of Sinai would seem a scarcely less appropriate task; or, to make what is perhaps a fairer comparison, how would it be possible to translate Jacob's awe-struck exclamation, on awaking from the dream in which he had seen the ladder with angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth,-"How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven!"—into any more finished metrical form that would equally well express the inadequacy of the imagination to grasp the thoughts on which it brooded? Yet this one sentence might be taken as a perfect condensation of the attitude in which the imagination of the Hebrew poet was left when most deeply stirred by the breath of Divine inspiration.

But I have no intention of dwelling on the merits of the attempt to attempt to reduce to metre and rhyme our English translations of the Hebrew poets. The often repeated effort to exhibit some of them in a form adapted to certain exigencies of the popular taste, may afford sufficient excuse for these comments on their intrinsic genius and literary character. It is a strange thing that, among all the various criticisms of modern times, there should have been so little effort to appreciate the special relation of the Hebrew poetry to the poetry of other nations and other ages. However true it may be that by

far the highest value of the writings of the Hebrew poets is not literary, but spiritual and moral,-that they are generally read, and generally rightly read, for purposes from which any literary estimate of their qualities and worth is far removed,-still, to the student of national literatures, no phenomena can be either more remarkable or more instructive than those of a literature produced in a moral climate so widely separated from that of all other nations as the Hebrew. The more profoundly we accept the spiritual inspiration of the Hebrew poets,—only rejecting, of course, the absurd doctrine of absolute verbal dictation by the Divine Spirit, through the mechanical instrumentality of certain chosen men, which obviously degrades them from poets into amanuenses at once,-the more remarkable these phenomena must be; for the more completely new will the conditions be under which the human imagination acts, and the more instructive will be the contrast between literatures which, like the Greek or the Teutonic, seem the indigenous development of human conditions of imagination, acting without any consciousness at least of supernatural constraint, and that which is educed, from first to last, out of the creative germs of a Divine inspiration. What are the distinctive features of such a literature? What are the characteristics which it has in common with all other literatures?

Perhaps we shall get the distinctest conception of the characteristic aspects of the Hebrew imagination, if we look first at what may be called its least unique, its least individual efforts,-those exquisite pastoral and national traditions in which the imagination certainly cannot be said to have been properly creative at all, but only formative and selective; evincing its special characteristics rather by the details on which it fixes and the prominence it gives to special features in the tradition, than by any productive power of its own. In such pastoral traditions

as the book of Genesis records, or in the later but equally simple and lovely story of the book of Ruth, there is more of that common beauty and simplicity which belongs to the early records of all great nations,-more which in its rural pictures and quiet naturalism reminds us at times of the Odyssey or the Scandinavian poems,-more of that "freshness of the early world" which belongs to the childhood of humanity itself, and therefore contains fewer characteristically Hebrew features,-than in any other part of the Bible literature.

Few can read the account of Abraham's servant waiting beside his kneeling camels at the well outside the city of Nahor till the hour of sunset, when the women came out to draw; of his first meeting with Rebekah, her kindly help in drawing for him and his camels, and her joyful return into the city with the news of the discovered relationship to his master, and the gold bracelets and earrings with which he had loaded her,-without being in some measure reminded of the beautiful narrative, in the Odyssey, of the Princess Nausikaa and her maidens going out for the day to wash the clothes of the household in the little river of the island, and disturbing, by their lamentations over the loss of their ball, the sleeping Ulysses. In both cases alike, a higher agency is made the thread of the story. The servant of Abraham is seeking a wife for his young master from among his own people, and God has "sent his angel before him," to choose for Isaac a wife more suitable than Canaan could have produced. Nausikaa, again, is represented as acting under the impulse of Athene, whose care for Ulysses prepares for him this fortunate meeting with the princess. In both cases, therefore, the naturalness of the life delineated is in a certain way bound up with the national religion,—or, as we must call it in the case of Greece, mythology; and the contrast between them is a fair illustration of the contrast