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PREFACE.

THE succeeding work does not profess to be an elaborate or full account of the mechanical structure of Hebrew poetry, nor a work of minute and verbal criticism. 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 subsidiary 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 occasionally 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 conformed to the common practice of printing his poetical quotations from Scripture, as poetry, in their form of parallelism. 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

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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 "Galleries," 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. 7

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