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collected in the words which had long struggled obscurely in David's bosom, and often trembled on his lips, but never been expressed till now, when, in the valley of the shadow of death, friendship became a name too feeble for his feelings-"My brother Jonathan !" If death dissolves dear relationships, it also creates others dearer still. Then, possibly, for the first time, the brother becomes a friend; but then also the friend is often felt to be more than a brother.

But we may not tarry longer on these dark and dewless hills. We pass to that hold in the wilderness, which David has not yet, but is soon to quit, for a capital and a throne. A sentence makes that hold visible, as if set in fire :-" And of the Gadites, there separated themselves unto David into the hold in the wilderness, men of might, and men of war for the battle, that could handle shield and buckler, whose faces were like the faces of lions, and were as swift as the roes upon the mountains." "There is," says Aird, 66 an Iliad of heroes in these simple words. Suppose David had his harp in his hand, in the hold, and worshiped with his warriors the God of Israel (in light introduced from the top of the cave), what a picture for Salvator or Rembrandt; or, rather, the whole effect is beyond the reach of the pictorial art. The visages and shapes, majestic in light and shadow, in that rock-ribbed den, could be given on the canvas, but nothing save the plastic power of poetry could lighten the darkly-congregated and proscribed cave, with the sweet contrasted relief of the wild roes without, unbeleaguered and free, on the green range of the unmolested hills. The verse is a perfect poem."

The mulberry-trees next arise before us, surmounting the valley of Rephaim. In themselves, there is little poetry. But on their summits you now hear a sound, the sound of “a going"-mysterious, for not a breath of wind is in the sky; it is the "going" of invisible footsteps, sounding a signal from God to David to press his enemies hard. We have often realized the image, as we listened to the wind, of innumerable tiny footsteps treading upon the leaves, their minute, incessant,

measured, yet rapid dance. It seemed at once music and dancing; and, had it ceased in an instant, would have reminded you of the sudden silence of a ball-room, which a flash of lightning had entered. It struck the soul of Burns, who, perhaps, heard in it the sound of spirits sullenly bending to overwhelming destiny, and found it reflective of his own history. But in the scene at Rephaim, it appeared as if armies were moving along the high tops of the trees; as, in "Macbeth," the wood began to move. Nature, from her high green places, seemed making common cause against the invader; and, in the windless waving of the boughs, was heard the cheer of inevitable victory. Would to God, that, in the silence of the present expectation of the Church, a "going," even as of the stately steps of Divine Majesty, were heard above, to re-assure the timid among the Church's friends, and to abash the stout-hearted among her foes.

From the thick of poetical passages and events in the other parts of Jewish history, we select a few-the fewer, that the mountains of prophecy which command at every point the history remain to be scaled. We find in Nathan's parable "a lamb for a burnt-offering," the simplest of stories, producing the most tremendous of heart-quakes. No four words in any language are simpler, and none stronger, than the words, "Thou art the Man." What effect one quiet sentence can produce! The whispers of the gods, how strong and thrilling! Nathan,. that gentle prophet, becomes surrounded with the grandeur of an apparition, and his words fall like the slow, heavy drops of a thunder-shower. The princely, gallant, and gifted king quails before him; and how can you recognize the author of the 18th Psalm, with its fervid and resistless rush of words and images, like coals of fire, in that poor prostrate worm, groveling on the ground, and afraid of the eyes of his own servants?

The genius of David remains for the analysis of the next chapter. But we must not omit the darkest and most poetic hour in all his history, when he cast himself into the hands of God rather than of men; and, when under the fiery sword and

the menacing angel, we can conceive admiration for the magnificence of the spectacle, contending with terror-his cheek pale, but his eye burning--the king in panic-the poet in transport, and grasping instinctively for a harp he had not to express his high-strung emotions. Lightning pausing ere it strikes-the poison of Pestilence, hung over the "high-viced city" in the sick air-Death, in the fine fiction of Le Sage, coming up to the morning Madrid-must yield to this figure leaning over the devoted city of God, while both earth and heaven seem waiting to hear the blow which shall break a silence too painful and profound.

Besides Solomon's Proverbs and Poems, there are in his life certain incidents instinct with imagination. The choice of Hercules is a fine apologue, but has not the sublimity or the completeness of the choice of Solomon.

Then there are the sublime circumstances of the dedication of the temple; the pomp of the procession by which the ark was brought up from the City of David to the prouder restingplace his son had prepared; the assemblage of all Israel to witness the solemnity; the sacrifice of innumerable sheep and oxen covering the temple and dimming the day with a cloud of fragrance; the slow march of the priests, through the courts and up the stairs of the glorious fabric, till the SANCTUARY was reached; the music, which attended the march, peopling every corner and crevice of the building with its voluminous and searching swell; the moment when the sudden ceasing of the music, in mid-volume, told the people without that the ark was now resting in its "own place;" the louder strain, of cymbals, psalteries, harps, and trumpets, which awoke when the priests returned from the most holy place; the slow coming down, as if in answer to the signal of the music, of the cloud of the glory of God—a cloud of dusky splendor, at once brighter than day and darker than midnight—the very cloud of Sinai, but without its thunders or lightnings; the music quaking into silence, and the priests throwing themselves on the ground, before the "darkness visible" which fills the whole house, lowering over

the foreheads of the bulls of brass, and blackening the waves of the molten sea; and the august instant when Solomon, trembling yet elate, mounts the brazen scaffold, and standing dimdiscovered amid a mist of glory, spreads out his hands, and, in the audience of the people, utters that prayer, so worthy of the scene, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven, and the heaven of heavens can not contain thee, how much less this house that I have builded?" Surely Solomon here, next to Moses on Sinai, had reached the loftiest point ever permitted to mortal man.

But time would fail us even to glance at the numerous remaining poetical incidents, circumstances, and passages in the historical books. We must omit, reluctantly, the visit of the Empress of Sheba to Sultan Solomon-Micaiah's vision of Ramoth-Gilead, and of what was to befall Israel and its king there the destruction of Sennacherib and his army, in one night, by the angel of the Lord-the great passover of Josiah --and, besides several incidents, already alluded to as occurring in Ezra and Nehemiah, the history of Esther-a history so simple, so full of touches of nature and glimpses into character, so divine, without any mention of the name of God. The most impassioned lover is the secret, who never names his mistress. The ocean is not less a worshiper that she mutters not her Maker's name. The sun is mute in his courts of praise. In Esther, God dwells, as the heart in the human frame-not visible, hardly heard, and yet thrilling and burning in every artery and vein. No label proclaims his presence, but the life of the book has been all derived from Him.

CHAPTER VII.

POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS.

WE have, in the previous chapter, rather outshot the period of the Psalms; but we must throw out a line, and take up David, ere we sail further.

No character has suffered more than that of David, from all sorts of imperfect appreciation. While some have treated him as a monster of cruelty and lust, classing him with the Neros and Domitians, others have invested him with almost divine immunities, as if we had no more right to ask at him than at God, "What dost thou ?"- -as if his motions had been irreproachable as those of the wind, and his vengeance inevitable as the thunderbolt. David, in our view of him, was neither a monster nor a deity-neither a bad man nor by any means the highest of Scripture worthies. William Hazlitt has nowhere more disgraced his talents, amid his many offenses, than in a wretched paper in the "Round Table," where he describes David as a crowned spiritual hypocrite, passing from debasing sins to debasing services-debauching Bathsheba, murdering Uriah, and then going to the top of his palace, and singing out his penitence in strains of hollow melody. Paine himself, even in his last putrid state, never uttered a coarser calumny than this. Nor ever did the pure and lofty spirit of Edward Irving look nobler, and speak in higher tones, than when, in his preface to "Horne on the Psalms," he gave a mild, yet stern verdict upon the character of this royal bard-a verdict in which judgment and mercy are both found, but with "mercy rejoicing against judgment." Many years have elapsed since we read that

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