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 the 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 influences. 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 incomparably 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 doctrines, from Oriental scenery, or from the structure of the Hebrew 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 detracts from its merit to record the occasions which gave it birth, the sparks of national or individual feeling from which it exploded, or the influence of other minds in lighting its flame,

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 creation itself, as it appeared to the Jewish mind. The austere simplicity of that remarkable verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," sounds a fitting keynote to the entire volume. Never shall we forget the emotion 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 our 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 effect, throwing us back into the gulf of ages, and giving us a dim retrospect of gigantic cycles rolling forward in silence. The history of the creation indeed is all instinct with poetry. As including 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 appetite and relieve the solitude of man. And then, the preparations

for his coming being complete, he 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 preparations 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 numerous. Solomon, for instance, in his personification of Wisdom, describes it in language lofty as that of Moses. "When he appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by him, as one brought up with him." Job abounds in reference to this cardinal 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

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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 encompasseth 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, "sitteth upon the floods," alluding not altogether to the swellings of Jordan, nor to the swellings, 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 immensity 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