tongue are the grand harmonies of Milton, the thoughts moving on the words, like his own description of heaven's gates "on golden hinges turning." These writers we know, do suffer, must suffer from any attempt to translate them. The very pronunciation of the Hebrew words is now irrecoverably lost. No man pretends to know what it was with anything approaching certainty.* How much greater then, must have been the majesty and sweetness of David's lyrics-how much more impetuous and splendid the volume of "rapt Isaiah's fire? -when the Hebrew words were fitly uttered and their effect heightened by all the foreign aids of instrumental harmony. The prevailing and distinctive characteristies of Hebrew poetry are majesty and tenderness. The subjects of Hebrew poetry are the noblest in themselves, and of most universal and enduring interest to the human family. There is, therefore, a general resemblance in all the inspired poets, but not on that account is there less diversity of genius and style, of imagery and association, than we discern among the poets of Greece, or of England. As in the primitive productions of the Creator's hand, the utmost diversity was united with the utmost excellence, as everything was beautiful with a beauty after its own kind, so in the poetical writers of the Bible. There are the tender elegies of Jeremiah, when he lamented the downfall of his country and the captivity of his people. There is the lofty and solemn plaint of David when he mourned, with generous grief, for Saul and Jonathan, and the passionate outcry of his mighty heart, swelling with anguish at the untimely end of his son Absalom, undutiful and ungodly, but, therefore, sorrowed for with an agony only the more bitter, the more piercing, the more desperate ! Then we have the superhuman sublimities of Isaiah, peculiarly the prophet of the Holy One of Israel. Then we have the lovely and lone youth, whose voice was like some pleasant instrument,-harp-like in its tender sadness,-who was with the captives by the river of *Calmet's Dictionary-Article, Poetry of the Hebrews. It is probable that the Hebrew loses less in being translated into the English, than into most other modern languages. See on this subject, some very striking observations in the Spectator, No. 405. 448650 Chebar, whose visions were so mystical and so grand, so full of shadowy imagery and of solemn truth! As no other book bears the same relation to the heart of man which the Bible does, so no other book bears the same relation to the outer universe. It over canopies the material world like the sky, and pours its hallowed light over all the scenes and provinces and processes of nature. Every uninspired writer is partial, provincial. The sacred writers alone, are Catholic and all-embracing, It is said that the topography of Homer is so exact, that the Greek mariner may now steer his course along the shore, around the isles of the Egean, by his immortal chart. The cliffs of Dover will endure as long in Shakspeare's verse, as on their native site; and "The banks and braes and streams around will evermore be welcome to the eye and dear to the heart of every patriot Scot. But these are all limited to a nation. The poetry of the Bible is the poetry of the world and of the race. It not only sets before us the holy and beautiful city, alike in her pride and in her desolation, when like the mystical Babylon she said in her heart, I sit a queen and shall see no sorrow, and when she sat solitary and had become as a widow, when "crowned with her tiara of proud towers," and when her Temple was profaned and prostrate, when the Roman eagles flapped their ill-omened wings over her, and the plough-share of ruin passed through her. It not only exhibits the fair daughters of Jerusalem when they gath ered in mystic and holy dance around the ark of God returning in triumph to its resting place, but when they hung their harps on the willows beside the rivers of Babylon, unwilling to awake their chords of sweetness in a strange land and at a tyrant's bidding. It not only celebrates national deeds and confers a sacred immortality on national topics and places and persons, on Bethlehem, where the infant Redeemer was born, on Nazareth, where he passed his early youth, on Capernaum, on Chorazin, and on Bethsaida, where so many mighty works were done, on Bethany, the dwelling-place of Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, on those weeping women that followed him to Calvary where he died, and to the grove where they laid him; but it casts its broad and beautiful mantle over all lands. Under its canopy of brightness all nations are gathered and glori fied. It tells of the primal creation of all things, of the first rising of Vesperus, "that led the starry hosts" of that period, in the fathomless, but unforgotten and glorious past, when the music of the spheres first broke in holy gladness on the listening ear of angels and of God. This subject may be looked at from another point of view. Abstract the poetical element from Scripture and you eviscerate the whole. Such is the native constitution of the human mind that the efficacy of that moral truth, which is addressed to the understanding, and that moral authority which is exerted over the conscience, is greatly aided by the poetical element of the Bible. Lord Byron, who knew wherein his great strength lay, as well as Samson, says of himself, "description is my forte." The power of graphic and moving description is the test and the triumph of the true poet. Take away the poetical element from the Bible and you exchange a description of God, as sitting upon the circle of the heavens, riding upon the wings of the wind, weighing the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, for a definition of God, as omnipotent, omnipresent, &c. Now, of all books in the world, of the same compass, the Bible has fewest definitions and most descriptions, for it is not a book of exact science, and it is entirely adapted to human nature. Think what wild work you would make by ignoring or abolishing the poetical element of the Bible. You convert the most picturesque and poetical book in existence into a record as dry and didactic as a merchant's ledger. You annihilate almost all, certainly by far the greater part, of the discourses of him who spake as man never spake. You destroy at once, almost every prophecy, whether of the Old Testament or the New, every fragment of the book of Psalms, the most varied and beautiful, the most precious and perfect book * *We are glad to see the view of the importance of this element of Scripture taken above, sustained by the high authority of the late Dr. Chalmers-See his correspondence by Dr. Hanna, letter 269, p. 819. Then turning to men grovelling in the valley far below, we hear him say invitingly to them Mortals that would follow me, Heaven itself would stoop to her. As men grow better, much of the poetry which is now admired and studied will be deservedly despised and neglected, and that only will be honoured which partakes of the prevailing character of the poetry of the Bible, which unites the highest poetical and the highest moral excellence. It is plain, in the second place, that the imagination has a legitimate office to perform, and that fiction is a lawful form of composition. What at once suggests and supplies a defence of the office and use of the imagination in literature, is, that the only book which God has given to man directly from himself, employs and appeals to it-that those parts of that book which are most devotional are most imaginative-that the minds of the prophets are most poetical when most raised and agitated with pious sensibility-that they hardly ever touch upon the person, glory, or kingdom of the Messiah, without instinctively and spontaneously breaking forth into song that the parables of our Saviour himself, which were his most characteristic form of teaching, which convey truth, most sacred, most precious, most practical, are imaginative in structure, and fictitious in form; in one word, that from the opening chapters of Genesis, in which we have an account of the first creation of Heaven and earth, to the closing chapters of the Apocalypse, in which we have an account of the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness; the practical and imaginative element appears everywhere and reigns supreme. * For some very original and important observations on our Lord's peculiar method of imparting instruction, the reader is referred to a most masterly disquisition on the internal evidences in the University Lectures, by Dr. R. J. Breckenridge, a discourse which will be regarded by every candid judge, as a permanent and very valuable contribution to an exceedingly important and difficult branch of Theological science. If fiction has been employed to seduce and corrupt, to insinuate fatal poison with the more deadly effect, because not professedly a moral teacher; if the writings of many of the most popular novelists, in various languages, have been stained with sensuality, what shall we say of the professed teachers of moral wisdom? Have they borne themselves so meekly, so purely, so unblanieably in their high office, as to make the charge of abuse and perversion, peculiarly applicable to those writers who mainly exercise and appeal to the imagination? What shall we say of the grave philosophers of Germany and France, of Fichte, of Schelling, of Kant, and of Hegel, of Cousin and Compte, of the metaphysics of Shaftesbury, of Hobbes, and of Hume, of Hume's History of England, and Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? When we think soberly of what men have done in the gravest and highest departments of human thought to mislead, to betray, to enslave, to corrupt and imbrute their fellow-men, in history, in political science, in physical speculations, in intellectual and moral philosophy, and most of all and worse than all, in Theology, and there see them single out fiction for proscription and shame, we feel inclined in all sadness of spirit, to say to them as Falstaff said to Prince Hal, "Banish Bardolph, banish Peto, banish Paine, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore, more valiant, being as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish plump Jack and banish all the world." We have seen that the Bible uses fiction largely as the vehicle of truth. The habit of condemning fiction as fiction, of condemning it by wholesale and in the gross, of condemning it without discrimination, without exception and without mercy, which prevails so largely in religious circles, we cannot but regard as alike irrational and unscriptural. These extreme views have to a lamentable extent, been identified with true piety. The repudiation of them has been and still is, looked upon as indicating a latitudinarian tendency. The truth is, that the man who defends and sanctions fiction as an allowable form of literary composition is, even now, re |