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

pable form to feelings which are too large and too deep-seated to be explained by articulate language.

. Let us begin with a brief survey of the poetry in something like chronological order. Here, even more than with the rest of the literature, we must remember that we have only a portion of all the poetry of Israel, and that perhaps a small portion. Whole classes of it must have disappeared. The literature was collected during and after the Exile by men who were passionately and wholly devoted to preserving the religion of Jehovah from the attacks of the heathen and to making it a living force for righteousness among the remnant of their own nation. They were thinking of higher matters than beauty of expression: they were concerned with the revelations of God to man, not with the imaginations of men's hearts. For them no writing was of value which did not bear on the history of God's chosen people and on the revelation to them of his will. The Pentateuch, as containing the Law, set the standard of admission to the Old Testament: to that were added first the other books of history and the books of the prophets, as supplementing and illustrating the Law, then these books of poetry and the rest of the Old Testament as in one way or another sacred through their relations to the religion of Israel as set forth in the Law. That there, must

have been other poetry than that which we have admits of no doubt: there must have been other songs of victory than those of Deborah, other dirges than those of David on Saul and Jonathan and on Abner, other poems of manners than those in Proverbs on the drunkard and the sluggard, other love and wedding songs than those in the Song of Solomon. What we have left merely shows how large and rich was the art of poetry among the people of Israel from the earliest times. Moreover, the dominance of the psalms and the wisdom poems in our Old Testament can hardly represent the original range of the old Hebrew poetry. During the troubled times of the Exile and the succeeding centuries, when the Jews were tossed from one conquerer to another, and harried and spoiled in the unceasing wars for the control of Palestine, all but their most essential writings must have disappeared. In the desperate struggle to keep themselves and the religion of Jehovah from being crushed and annihilated by the heathen they had no time to think of songs of love and feasting and the making and copying of poetry which served no more substantial purpose than beauty. We must remember, then, that in the poetry of the Old Testament we have only a portion of Hebrew literature, and that rigidly selected for a direct and practical religious purpose.

Now when we look at these remnants of the poetry, and especially when we arrange it in what is probably chronological order, we find great changes in form from the early poetry to the later. The early poetry we may take in a large sense as that which comes from before the eighth century B.C., when the revelations of the great prophets Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah made the turning point both in the history and in the literature of Israel. Of this early poetry we have few examples. The Song of Deborah in Judges is held to be the earliest of all: it is undoubtedly the song of triumph which was composed and uttered by Deborah herself to celebrate the great victory won by her people. A couple of centuries later than this perhaps would be the dirge which David sang at the death of Saul and Jonathan, the "Song of the Bow," as it is called in our version, in 2 Samuel i. Probably from about the same period comes the Blessing of Jacob in Genesis xlix; and from a somewhat later time the Blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy xxxiii, the oracles of Balaam in Numbers xxiii-xxiv, and a few smaller fragments. These poems, except the Song of Deborah and David's lamentation, in the course of transmission became separated from the occasions which gave them birth; and the composers of our books inserted them in places which seemed to them appropriate. All these