densed energy in the descriptions, which bring them to the imagination with a sort of electric force, and leave us nothing to wish for on the score of rhetorical embellishment. We only feel disposed to regret that so fine a genius should have possessed so bad a heart; admiring the mind, while we cannot but detest the man.

I shall now conclude this chapter with an extremely eloquent passage from Herder's work on the spirit of Hebrew poetry, which has risen to very high celebrity in Germany. Referring to the prophecies of Balaam, he says:* "From a man of such imagination we should expect effusions of a bold and elevated character; and

such his prophecies are. They possess the highest dignity, brevity, animation, and copiousness of imagery. There is little in the later prophets, and nothing in the discourses of Moses, that equals them in this respect. They stand somewhere in the same rank with the book of Job; and the narrative, by which they are introduced, with all those dreams and visions, with the fearful climax of warnings, the various high places with seven altars upon each-all this is so simple, told with such emphasis and symmetry of parts, that we seem to be brought, by a kind of magic ladder, to that for which such preparation is made." These are the observations of a man of exquisite taste and quick sensibility, though occasionally prone to indulge in dreamy speculations. He is nevertheless an acute biblical critic.

Vol. ii. p. 174.

CHAPTER XXXII.

The beauties of Hebrew poetry abridged by translation. Many pious persons unconscious of its existence. Absurdity in supposing there can be any impiety in admiring it as poetry. Admiration one of the sources of pure enjoyment. How much the lovers of fine poetry lose by not reading the Bible. The prophecies of Balaam especially remarkable for poetic graces of the highest order. Miles Coverdale's Bible.

ALTHOUGH, as I have endeavoured to show, the first of those prophetic songs ascribed by Moses to Balaam is superlatively beautiful as a production of human genius, exhibiting in an eminent degree the most attractive graces of composition, still the predictions which follow are distinguished in a still more eminent degree by the higher attributes of poetry. Notwithstanding that those attributes are in a measure obscured by being presented through the medium of a translation, in which some of the more delicate tints of colouring are lost, because they are too refined, too transitive, too immediately akin, either to the idiom or to the structure of the Hebrew, to be transfused into a language characterized by qualites so oppugnant to that of the primitive races as our own: it will nevertheless be obvious to the most obtuse taste, that the poetry of the Bible excels that of the best

compositions of any people, ancient or modern, with whom we are acquainted. It is allowed by the most competent judges to transcend the noblest productions of the Greeks, who stand at the head of all civilized communities for the surpassing excellence of their writings, whether philosophical or poetical. This circumstance alone, that is, the sublime pre-eminence of the Bible, considered only upon the ground of its literary merits, without any reference to its inspiration, should naturally excite our desire to become masters of its riches; but when we consider that the sacred volume is likewise the treasury of divine truth-the grand reservoir of celestial wisdom, from which the numerous channels of religious knowledge are supplied, and whence the unpolluted waters of salvation are diffused over the wilderness of human infirmity, clothing it in the verdure of righteousness, and fructifying it to a harvest to be laid up in the inexhaustible garners of heaven-can we open those sacred pages without feeling our delight blended with the deepest veneration, our sense of the beauties there displayed heightened by our consciousness that those words which they embellish are the words of revelation-the words of eternal life?

It is no doubt true that many pious persons who daily resort to their Bibles, as a holy exercise to stimulate their devotions, are utterly insensible to those exquisite qualities of composition in which that inspired book abounds; but the great mass of such persons, many of whom may be truly said, without any grave

disparagement, to be more holy than wise, fail to perceive the beauties of the various productions which it comprises, chiefly because they look upon the secondary enjoyment, derived from the perusal of lofty and ennobling thoughts conveyed in elegant and poetical language, as altogether incompatible with a profitable study of the sacred records, containing those infallible promises upon which the hopes of salvation, and thus the encouragements to righteousness, are grafted, and therefore to be read solely for the purpose of treasuring up that knowledge which supplies the clue of escape from the labyrinth of sin. This may be a very pious feeling, but it is nevertheless a very mistaken one. Such persons ought to consider that innocent gratification cannot be inconsistent with the purest, nay with the most fervent devotion; for admiration of any kind, excited by the composition of the sacred Scriptures, must elevate, and can by no moral possibility depress the pious fervour of a really devout reader. Moreover those overweening pietists, who would fain persuade themselves that to appreciate the poetical or rhetorical beauties of the Bible is a kind of intellectual impiety, ought to understand, that if the highest ornaments of poetical diction had been in any imaginable degree inconsistent with the solemn truths of Holy Writ, it is certain they never would have been employed in those writings, produced under divine sanction, and communicating the revelations of that "wisdom which is from above." Is it not much more reasonable to suppose that the infallible God

who imparted the subjects of his revelations, permitted them to be delivered, for the benefit of all times, in such forms of language as best suited those heavenly oracles; still, this might have been done without suggesting the very words in which those oracles were conveyed, for the language merely, does not certainly exhibit any specific marks of divinity, though the truth which that language reveals undoubtedly does. We cannot then, with any show of reason, be precluded from admiring what the Deity has so graciously sanctioned; and admiration, it must be conceded, is one, and that, too, the most prominent, of the many sources of enjoyment. Not only so, but it is likewise, in numerous instances, an effectual instrument of devotion. We may, then, safely and laudably encourage the delight derived to us from reading the poetry of the Bible, without attaching to ourselves the suspicion that we do not read this inspired book with a spiritual appetite; for depend upon it, the true Christian who most admires the richness of its language and the splendid adornments of its poetry, will best appreciate its wisdom and the ineffable truths with which it is so abundantly stored.

Can any one seriously imagine for a moment, that the true believer, who reads the Holy Scriptures with a deep relish of those beauties which belong to them as the compositions of men-of men, indeed, divinely endowed and commissioned to proclaim God's communications to their erring brethren, nevertheless exercising their own high faculties in the development