nificent, but its statements are "words unutterable,” which it is not possible for the tongue of man to utter!

Secondly, Our division is simple, and is thus better fitted to the simplicity of the Hebrew poetry. 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 accompanying song, there break the clouds and expand the landscapes of futurity.

This lyrical impulse was not, however, the mere breath of human genius. It was the "wind of God's mouth," the immediate 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 classification-It links the effect more closely with its cause-it exhibits 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 inspiration, alike eloquent and powerful, were to utter an absurdity. But is it less absurd to suppose a systematic decline in the fitness and fullness of the lyres-in the eloquence and power

of the prophets--when we remember, first, that Habakkuk, Haggai, and Zechariah, belonged to this latter class; when we remember, secondly, that the latter day of Judah exhibited crises of equal magnitude, and as worthy 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 remember, 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? 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 unto the fathers, by the prophets, did, in the last days, speak unto us by his own Son.

CHAPTER IV.

POETRY OF THE PENTATEUCH.

WE have intimated already, that, though we have, in the former chapter, classified Hebrew poetry under certain generic heads, we deem it best, in our future remarks, to pursue the method of following it down as we find it in the various writings 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 throughout 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 preserved; 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 wilderness-his sudden entrance into the presence of Pharaoh-his lifting up, with that sinewy, swarthy hand, the rod over the

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 hieroglyphics of their fall; runs rapidly across the antediluvian patriarchs; 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. 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, lowering 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, colored by early familiarity with that strange, silent tongue, partakes here and there of certain of its qualities, its intricate simplicity, its "language within language" of allegorical

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meaning, and resembles the 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 εлоç птεçо8ν—a word rolled together like a double star-but often a plain, unmetaphorical term, which quakes under the thought or scene it describes. 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 simplicity 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 journey of Abraham, going forth, not knowing whither he went, in search of a far country-the most momentous journey in the history of man-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