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.

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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 momentousthe 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 veiled, 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 exponded! 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 afterwards 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 references to this cardinal truth. Isaiah, speaking in the person of God, and throwing down a gauntlet 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.

The

Another event teeming with poetry, and which had no small effect on the Jewish imagination, was the flood. 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 for ever-and, amid all this 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 gran

deur 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 should 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 centre 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 diadem of fire--a fierce wind blowing in restless eddies around it-torrents of rain descending through the darkness-the lightnings of God playing upon the summitthunders crashing incessantly-the trump which shall call the dead to judgment, sending forth a preliminary note, and causing the mountain to thrill and tremble-and heard at intervals, above all, the very voice of the Eternal-the millions of Israel standing silent on the plain, awe and wonder casting a shadow over their faces-and, amid all this, one lonely man going up the hill, and quaking as he goes the utterance of the fiery law from amid the gloom--the Amen of the tribes-. the seclusion of Moses with Jehovah, for forty days, on the top of the mount-the finger of God, the same finger which, dipping itself in glory, had touched the firmament, and left

as its trace the sun, writing the ten precepts on the two tables-the passing of the Lord before Moses, as he hasted and threw himself on the ground-the descent of the favored man, with his face shining out the tidings where he had been-all this taken together, while calculated to cast a salutary terror down to remote ages, and to make the children, among the willows of Canaan, to tremble at the name of Sinai, was fitted, too, to produce a peculiar and terrible poetry. We find, accordingly, the shadow of Horeb communicating influence to almost all the Hebrew prophets. It was unquestionably in David's eye, when he sung that highest of his strains, the 18th Psalm, which has carried our common metrical versions of it to unwonted pitches of power :—

"On cherub and on cherubim

Full royally he rode,

And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad."

It was in Daniel's view, when he described the fiery stream going before the Ancient of Days. The prayer of Habakkuk is a description of the same scene. "God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise." Paul, even, when turning his back on the mount that might be touched, seems to linger in admiration of its grandeur, and his description of it is full of poetry. It is hardly too much to say that the genius of the race was kindled at the fires of Sinai.

We mention, as another powerful stimulus to the imagination of the Jews, the peculiar economy of that peculiar people. This, what with the thunders amid which it was cradled the meteors which, as a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, guided and guarded it-the miracles which, like a supernatural circle, hedged it in the mysteries of its tabernacle-the unearthly brightness of that Shechinah which filled its holy of holies-the oracular lustre shining around its priests-the pomp, the solemnity, and the minuteness of its sacrifices-the wailing cadences, the brisker measures, blended with the awful bursts of its ministrelsy—the temple, with its marble and gold, its pinnacles turned, like the fingers of suppliant hands, to heaven-its molten sea, and bulls of brass-its "carved.angels, ever eager-eyed."