that both were commensurate. A similar fate has befallen Jeremiah. Because he was plaintive, other qualities have been denied, or grudgingly conceded him. The tears which often blinded him, have blinded his critics also.

The first quality exhibited in Jeremiah's character and history, is shrinking timidity. His first words are, "Ah, Lord God, behold I can not speak, for I am a child." The storm of inspiration had seized on a sensitive plant or quivering aspen, instead of an oak or a pine. Jeremiah, at this crisis, reminds us of Hamlet, in the greatness of his task, and the indecision or feebleness of his temperament. And yet this very weakness serves at length to attest the truth and power of the afflatus. Jeremiah, with a less pronounced personality than his brethren, supplies a better image of an instrument in God's hand, of one moved, tuned, taught, from behind and above. Strong in supernal strength, the child is made a "fenced city, an iron pillar, and a brazen wall." Traces, indeed, of his original feebleness and reluctance to undertake stern duties, are found scattered throughout his prophecy. We find him, for instance, renewing the curse of Job against the day of his birth. We find him, in the same chapter, complaining of the derision to which he was subjected, in the discharge of his mission. But he is re-assured, by remembering that the Lord is with him, as a "mighty terrible one." His chief power, besides pathos, is impassioned exhortation. His prophecy is one long application. He is distinguished by powerful and searching practicalness. He is urgent, vehement, to agony. His "heart is broken" within him; his "bones shake;" he is "like a drunken man," because of the Lord, and the words of his holiness. This fury often singles out the ignorant pretenders to the prophetic gift, who abounded in the decay and degradation of Judah. Like an eagle plucking from the jackdaw his own shed plumes, does Jeremiah lay about him in his righteous rage. Their dull dreams he tears in pieces, for -“what is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord." For their feigned "burdens," he substitutes a weight of wrath and contempt, under which they sink into ignominy. Mingled with this

ardor of spirit, and earnestness of appeal, there are touches of poetic grandeur. Witness the picture in the 4th chapter, of the tokens attesting the forthcoming of the Lord to vengeance. Chaos comes again over the earth. Darkness covers the heaven. The everlasting mountains tremble. Man disappears from below, and the birds fly from the darkened air. Cities become ruins, and the fruitful places wildernesses, before the advancing anger of the Lord. Byron's Darkness is a faint copy of this picture; it is an inventory of horrible circumstances, which seem to have been laboriously culled and painfully massed up. Jeremiah performs his task with two or three strokes; but they are strokes of lightning.

Before closing his prophecy, this prophet must mount a lofty peak, whence the lands of God's fury, the neighboring idolatrous countries, are commanded, and pour out lava streams of invective upon their inhabitants. And it is a true martial fire which inspirits his descriptions of carnage and desolation. In his own language, he is a "lion from the swellings of Jordan, coming up against the habitation of the strong." All tears are now wiped from his face. There is a fury in his eye which makes you wonder if aught else were ever there; it is mildness maddened into a holy and a fearful frenzy. In a noble rage, he strips off the bushy locks of Gaza, dashes down the proud vessel of Moab, consumes Ammon, makes Esau bare, breaks the bow of Elam, and brandishes again, and again, and again, a sword over Babylon, crying out at each new blow, "a sword is upon the Chaldeans; a sword is upon the liars; a sword is upon her mighty men; a sword is upon their horses; a sword is upon her treasures." We have difficulty in recognizing the weeper among the willows in this homicidal Energy, all whose tears have been turned into devouring fire.

Besides his Lamentations-which have occasioned the general mistake that he is wholly an elegiac poet-fine strokes of pathos are scattered amid the urgency, the boldness, and the splendor of his prophecy. His is that melting figure of Rachel, weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because

they are not. His is that appeal to Ephraim-"Is he my dear son is he a pleasant child?" which sounds like the yearning of God's own bowels. His the plaintive question-"Is there no balm in Gilead?" And his the wide wish of sorrow--" Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep night and day for the slain of the daughter of my people!"

And was not this wide wish granted when, in the Lamentations, he poured out his heart in those deep melodies of desolation, mourning, and woe? Here, to use the beautiful lan-guage of one departed, "the scene is Jerusalem lying in heaps; the poet, the child of holy inspiration, appears upon the ruins, and, with notes of desolation and woe, strikes his harp to the fallen fortunes of his country. It was not that the pleasant land now lay waste-and it did lie waste; it was not that the daughters of Jerusalem were slain, and her streets ran red--and they did run red; but it was the temple-the temple of the Lord, with its altars, its sanctuary, its holy of holies leveled to the ground-rubbish where beauty stood, ruin where strength was its glory fled, its music ceased, its solemn assemblies no more, and its priesthood immolated, or carried far away. These had shed their glory over Israel, and over all the land, and it was the destruction of these which gave its tone of woe to the heart of the Israelite indeed." Yet the feelings which fill his heart to bursting are of a complicated character. A sense of Israel's past glory mingles with a sense of her guilt: he weeps over her ruin the more bitterly that it is self-inflicted. There is no protest taken against the severity of the divine judgments, and yet no patriot can more keenly appreciate, vividly describe, or loudly lament the splendors that were no more. We can conceive an angrier prophetic spirit, finding a savage luxury, in comparing the deserted streets and desecrated shrines of Jerusalem with his own predictions, and. crying out—“Did I not foretell all this?" as, with swift, resounding strides, flaming eye, gaunt cheek, and disheveled hair, he passed on his way through them, like the spirit of their desolation, to the wilder

ness.

Jeremiah views the scene with softer feelings, identifies himself with his country, feels Jerusalem's sword in his own heart, and lingers in fond admiration of its happier times, when the sons of Zion were comparable to fine gold—when her Nazarites were purer than snow, whiter than milk, more ruddy than rubies—when the beloved city was full of people, great among the nations, and a princess among the provinces-the perfection of beauty, and the joy of the whole earth.

We are reminded of the "Harp of Selma," and of blind. Ossian sitting amid the evening sunshine of the Highland valley, and in tremulous, yet aspiring notes, telling to his small, silent, and weeping circle, the tale of

"Old, unhappy, far off things,

And battles long ago."

It has become fashionable to abuse the poems of Ossian; but, admitting their forgery, as well as faultiness, they seem to us, in their better passages, to approach more nearly than any modern English prose to the force, vividness, and patriarchal simplicity and tenderness of the Old Testament style. Lifting up like a curtain the mist of the past, they show us a world unique and intensely poetical, peopled by heroes, bards, maidens, and ghosts, and separated by their mountains from all countries and ages save their own. It is a great picture, painted on clouds instead of canvas, and invested with colors as gorgeous as its shades are dark. Its pathos has a wild sobbing in it-an Æolian tremulousness of tone, like the wail of spirits. And than Ossian himself, the last of his race, answering the plaints of the wilderness-the plover's shriek, the "hiss" of the homeless stream, the bee in the heather bloom, the rustle of the birch above his head, the roar of the cataract behind, in a voice of kindred freedom and kindred melancholy, conversing less with the little men around him than with the giant spirits of his fathers-we have few finer figures in the whole region of poetry. Ossian, in short, ranks with the Robbers and the Sea

sons, as a work of prodigal beauties, and more prodigal faults, and, partly through both, has impressed the world.

We return to the sweet, sad singer of Israel, only to notice the personal interest he acquires, from the fuller details given of his history. If less interesting by nature than other prophets, he is more so by circumstances. Isaiah, Elijah, and Ezekiel, “come like shadows, so depart." We know little of their ordinary life. They appear only on great occasions, and their appearance, like that of a comet, is generally a signal for surprise or terror. We scarcely can conceive of them suffering from common calamities, although sublime agonies are often theirs. Isaiah in the stocks, instead of turning back the shadow of Ahaz; Ezekiel, drawn up by a rope of rags from a dungeon, instead of being snatched away by the locks of his head toward heaven, seem incongruous conceptions. But we find Jeremiah smitten, put in the stocks, the yoke upon his neck broken; we see him sinking in the mire of the dungeons, and drawn up thence by cords; we find many similar incidents recorded in his history, which, while lessening somewhat its grandeur, add to its humanity. "Alas! my brother," is our exclamation, as we witness his woes. A brother's voice, now tremulous in grief, now urgent in entreaty, now loud in anger, and now swelling into lofty poetry, sounds down upon us through the solemn centuries of the past, and we grieve that the grave denies us the blessings of a brother's presence, and the pressure of a brother's hand.

EZEKIEL.

But who dare claim kindred with Ezekiel, the severe, the mystic, the unfathomable, the lonely, whose hot, hurried breath we feel approaching us, like the breath of a furnace? Perhaps the eagle may, for his eye was as keen and as fierce as hers. Perhaps the lion may, for his voice, too, sounded vast and hollow on the wilderness wind. Perhaps the wild ass may, for his step was, like hers, incontrollable. Or does he not turn away proudly from all these, and, looking up, demand as asso