originality. This is owing to two causes-its extreme antiquity and the uniqueness of its themes. It is the most archaic of all poetries. Standing nearer than any other to the first days of creation, it fell to it to be the first to sing creation's hymn. And how greatly sublimer every way is the muse which has sung of the origin of worlds, and of the race, than those which, by the aid of fable and invention, have attempted to trace the rise of a nation or the birth of a single people. The hero of ancient Hebrew poetry was no Eneas-the founder of a particular dynasty; but the first man-the primal father of the race. It has justly been asked, “Homer had his teachers, but who taught Moses?" Hebrew song had indeed no pattern to copy fromno older muse than itself to imitate. It is essentially and entirely original-self-educed, self-developed. It is no exotic transplanted from some sunnier clime. No warp crossed into a foreign woof. No echo of an older minstrelsy. Other poesies have sprung from that of Palestine; but it sprang from none. The first of vocal streams, it issued direct from its fountains in the depths of nature, when these were filled by the inspiration of God. Other bards may borrow and imitate the bards of the Bible lend and create.

Another marked characteristic of Hebrew poetry is its profound religiousness. All true poetry in its higher forms is religious; for it is the impassioned utterances of the soul when it is seeking after, or

when having found, it stands confronted with the highest perfection, either actual or ideal. If only ideal, then poetry is simply the apotheosis in song of the amplified conceptions of the soul itself. But when the poet stands in the presence of the actual divinity-the all-good, the all-beautiful, the all-truethen his song becomes instinct with ideas which are above and beyond his own; and is animated with a fire which has descended from an altar which is higher than that of his muse. Now in the Hebrew poetry it is the actual, not the ideal, divine which is celebrated. The bards of Palestine stood in the immediate presence of the Jehovah-they heard his voice they listened to the echoes of his footsteps— they looked upon his awful symbols-beheld the miracles of his power-and received his inspiration. Hence a divine and imperishable power is in all their songs; and their poetry, more than that of all other nations, is characterized by its pure, and rich, and living religious element.

It rings and rolls through the ages as one continuous hymn of praise to the Creator and the Redeemer, God. It is the one grand psalm of piety, many-voiced, yet ever the same choral symphony. At first you listen to it, faintly breaking on the ear, as if it were the caught-up echoes of those musicnotes which the sons of the morning had raised in creation's hymn; till, deepening and widening, like the river in its flow, you hear it pour a fuller minstrelsy as it seems to mingle with the heavenly choirs.

In what mood or frame can devotion be when it shall not find articulate expression to its thoughts and its feelings in the sacred hymns of Israel? What emotions, joyous or mournful, would it pour forth in vocal utterance, for which it shall not find the appropriate words in the Psalms of David? Is there an inmost chord which he has not touched?a condition of the religious consciousness which he has not anticipated?-a single pent-up feeling of devotion, which with him as its interpreter needs now to be voiceless? The lofty aspiration, the winged hope, the weeping contrition, the grateful thanksgiving, the wishful supplication, the broad human sympathy, the devout sentiment, have all been articulated by him in the language of sacred poetry.

Another distinctive feature of Hebrew poetry is its spontaneousness. Open the Psalter at any part, you find streams of song pouring forth as the brooks and water-falls which gush down the mountains of Palestine after the latter rain. Not more free was the murmur of the winds through the cedar forests of Lebanon, than is the music of David's song. As the trees of Eden, so does this tree of sacred song seem to bourgeon and to blossom, while there was not a man to till the ground. All is ease, freedom, naturalness. There is no constraint, no effort, no affectation, seemingly no art. The heart was full, and being full overflowed in spontaneous song.

The last distinctive feature of Hebrew poetry

which I shall mention is its great range and variety of subject. With imperial eye the sacred muse looked out on flood and field-on land and oceanon earth and sky—on the starry night and the sunlit day on the quiet pastures and the battle-field-on the bowers of love and the bier of death-on the solitary haunts of the crowded city-on the king's palace and the shepherd's tent: she beheld infancy, manhood, old age; grief, joy, hope, despair; time and eternity-death and immortality-heaven and hell: all forms she saw, all passions, all beings, all things visible and invisible; all periods past, present, and to come: these all her eye beheld and scanned, and weaving her visions into song, she has left to remotest generations the gathered treasures of her universal poesy.

CHAPTER X.

HEBREW POETRY-CONTINUED.

WITH regard to the forms of poetry, it must be confessed that there is not the same variety among the Hebrews as is to be found among the Greeks, the Romans, and even the nations of India. For while the epic and the drama, the two highest styles so far as mere art is concerned, were cultivated successfully by these, among the Israelites we find only their germs or first rudiments. But as we shall see, this might arise from other causes than the want of the requisite literary cultivation. Indeed, we can not look upon the attempts which have been made to find the regular epic and drama in the Hebrew poetry otherwise than as betraying the want of a just appreciation of its true character.

An epic poem requires an heroic age sufficiently remote to enable the poet to found upon its traditions, which by his time have fallen into that degree of obscurity which leaves him at full liberty to mix poetic fable with historical facts. While it thus allows the poet to adorn his subject by means of fiction, antiquity is also favorable to those high and august ideas which epic poetry is designed to raise, since it tends to aggrandize, in our imagination,