Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide -those sunbeams like swords!

And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as one after one,

So docile they came to the pen-door till folding be done.

They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed

Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed;

And now one after one seeks its lodging as star follows star

Into eve and the blue far above us,-so blue and so far.

Browning chose, we may assume, wholly to neglect the spirit of the Biblical narrative. Leaving out of account the ambling measure, itself so incongruous beside the stately march of the Bible story, one sees that in place of the grave restraint, and the absorption in the solid realities of life, he lets his thought spin itself out into a network of subtleties; and the imaginations which he puts into the mouth of David are those of the modern day, not of the East, and of the ancient past.

Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear

And the sultriness showing the lion is crouched in his lair.

And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with with gold dust divine,

And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell

That the water is wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

This David of Browning's imagination could not have lived before the Italian renaissance. The pleasures of these men of the East from whom the Old Testament sprang were grave; and though they enjoyed their sensations, they did not know that they had them. There is a phrase in one of Mr. Kipling's stories which describes the difference. In Her Majesty's Servants, the animals get to talking about the things each is afraid of, and the bul

locks cannot understand why at the flight of the bullets the elephant stampedes, while they graze in peace. Then the elephant explains to them the difference: "You can only see out of your heads, I can see into mine." That phrase sums up the difference between the Oriental and ancient world from which come these stories of the Bible, and the modern world from which springs Browning's poem. The thought of the East was essentially simple. It knew only the objective and solid facts of which man has direct sensation, and the simple and primitive emotions which are his reaction to them. It has no perception of the subtler shades and shadows of feeling in which modern writers delight, nor of the complicated webs of thought which grow from men's efforts to reason out the universe. Nothing will more accentuate the chasm which stands between us and that ancient world than an attempt to imagine Browning's Saul written in the style of these Biblical narratives. The writers of the book of Samuel could not have conceived the subtleties and arabesques of this poem; and if they had been able to do so, their language would have provided no means of expressing them.

Yet to this very limitation we must ascribe much of the permanent expressive power of the Bible narratives. They are an unbroken stream of objective

realities. Their whole texture is composed of the things which men can feel and see and hear. The very lack of the means for subordinating ideas took away from the writers the power of coloring the facts with their own personality. In Browning's poem the simple realities of the original story of David are overlaid and obscured by his own imaginings. These imaginations, though in themselves interesting to many people, are individual and personal and therefore of limited appeal, where the Old Testament story is impersonal and universal and therefore permanent. Our more elaborate art may build more complicated structures, and carry its chiselling of detail to a higher degree of subtlety; but in so far as it loses its hold on the qualities which belong to the Biblical narrative it loses power. For, after all, swiftness of movement, sparing but vivifying use of background, unflagging earnestness of purpose, and depth of feeling are the qualities which give to narrative the surest hold on the human imagination.

CHAPTER III

THE POETRY

I

IN the preceding chapter on the narratives of the Bible, we have found that their most essential and distinctive characteristic is the transfiguring of a limpid and simple vividness by deep earnestness and elevation of feeling; so that stories of the rough and homely life of the early days of Israel are made worthy to stand by the narratives of the gospel. In this chapter I am to discuss the poetry of the Bible; and here again we shall find the same combination of a primitive simplicity and concreteness of expression with the profound and ennobling emotion that transfigures the experience of man into an expression of permanent verities. The distinguishing characteristic of the poetry of the Bible is its absolute objectivity: it knew only facts which are concrete and which mean always the same to all men. This complete objectivity and concreteness joined to the strong rhythm and the rich coloring of the style give pal