for his coming being complete, he appears. The stage having been swept, and garnished, and lighted up, the great actor steps forward. “And on the sixth day God said, let us make man in our own image." How magnificent these preparations! how fine their gradations! and how deep and mystical the antithesis between the scale on which they had been conducted and the result in which they had issued, in the appearance, amid all. that vast and costly theatre, of a child of clay. And how does the contrast swell, instead of narrowing, when we believe, with the geologists, that innumerable centuries had in these preparations been expended! The impulse given to the imagination. of the Jews, through their conceptions of the creation, was great, and the allusions of their poets to it afterward are numerous. Solomon, for instance, in his personification of Wisdom, describes it in language lofty as that of Moses. "When he appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by him, as one brought up with him." Job abounds in reference to this cardinal truth. Isaiah, speaking in the person of God, and throwing down a gantlet to all the heathen deities, says, "I have made the earth, and created man upon it. I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens." Thus does this primal truth or fact of Scripture flash down light and glory over all its pages, and the book may be said to stand in the brightness of its opening verse.

Another event teeming with poetry, and which had no small effect on the Jewish imagination, was the flood. The tradition of a flood is found in all nations, but often in company with ludicrous images and circumstances which mar its sublimity. It is described by Moses with even more than his usual bareness, and almost sterile simplicity. His language scarcely ever rises, save when he speaks of the "windows of heaven being opened," above the level of prose; not another figure in the narrative confesses his emotion at the sight of deluge enwrapping the globe-the yell of millions of drowning and desperate men and animals contending with the surge of the sea-the mountains of earth overtopped by the aspiring waters-the sun retiring from the sight, as if in grief and forever--and, amid all this

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assemblage of terrors, the one vessel rising majestic and alone, through whose windows look forth Seth's children, their eyes dimmed and darkened with tears. And yet the bare truth of the flood, sown in the hearts of the Hebrews, became a seed of poetry. The flood put a circle of lurid glory round the head of their God; it awed the patriarchs in their midnight tents-it gave a new charm and beauty to the "rainbow which encompasseth the heavens with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it." It brought out all the possible grandeur of the element of water. Frequent are the allusions to it in after days. "The Lord," says David, "sitteth upon the floods," alluding not altogether to the swellings of Jordan, nor to the swellings, seen from Carmel, of the Mediterranean, but to that ocean without a shore, on which his eye saw the Jehovah seated, his wings the winds, his voice the thunder of the sea-billows, his feet feathered with lightnings, and his head lost in the immensity of o'er-canopying gloom. Again, saith Isaiah, in the name of the Almighty, "this is as the waters of Noah unto me, for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah shall go no more over the earth, so have I sworn not to be wroth with thee." And, besides other allusions, we find Peter speaking of God bringing in a "flood upon the world of the ungodly." Thus do the "waters of Noah" send down a far deep voice, which is poetry, into the depths of futurity; and there is no topic, even yet, which, if handled with genius, is so sure to awaken interest and emotion.

Passing over the events connected with the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of the human race-the histories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-the romantic story of Joseph and his brethren-the wondrous phenomena attending the departure of Israel from Egypt, we pause at Sinai, the center of the ancient system. There was enacted a scene fitted to produce, in the first instance, an alarm and awe inconsistent with the sublime, but ultimately to create of itself a volcanic stream of national imagination, rising from the roots of the savage hill. Sinai, bare, dark, craggy, in itself, surrounded suddenly by a mantle of gloom, and crowned above all other hills with a dia

dem of fire-a fierce wind blowing in restless eddies around it -torrents of rain descending through the darkness—the lightnings of God playing upon the summit-thunders crashing incessantly the trump which shall call the dead to judgment, sending forth a preliminary note, and causing the mountain to thrill and tremble-and heard at intervals, above all, the very voice of the Eternal-the millions of Israel standing silent on the plain, awe and wonder casting a shadow over their facesand, amid all this, one lonely man going up the hill, and quaking as he goes-the utterance of the fiery law from amid the gloom-the Amen of the tribes-the seclusion of Moses with Jehovah, for forty days, on the top of the mount-the finger of God, the same finger which, dipping itself in glory, had touched the firmament, and left as its trace the sun, writing the ten precepts on the two tables-the passing of the Lord before Moses, as he hasted and threw himself on the ground-the descent of the favored man, with his face shining out the tidings where he had been-all this taken together, while calculated to cast a salutary terror down to remote ages, and to make the children, among the willows of Canaan, to tremble at the name of Sinai, was fitted, too, to produce a peculiar and terrible poetry. We find, accordingly, the shadow of Horeb communicating influence to almost all the Hebrew prophets. It was unquestionably in David's eye, when he sung that highest of his strains, the 18th Psalm, which has carried our common metrical versions of it to unwonted pitches of power:

"On cherub and on cherubim

Full royally he rode,

And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad."

described the fiery stream The prayer of Habakkuk "God came from Teman, His glory covered the

It was in Daniel's view, when he going before the Ancient of Days. is a description of the same scene. and the Holy One from Mount Paran. heavens, and the earth was full of his praise." Paul, even,

when turning his back on the mount that might be touched, seems to linger in admiration of its grandeur, and his description of it is full of poetry. It is hardly too much to say that the genius of the race was kindled at the fires of Sinai.

We mention, as another powerful stimulus to the imagination of the Jews, the peculiar economy of that peculiar people. This, what with the thunders amid which it was cradled-the meteors which, as a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, guided and guarded it-the miracles which, like a supernatural circle, hedged it in-the mysteries of its tabernacle-the unearthly brightness of that Shechinah which filled its holy of holies-the oracular luster shining around its priests-the pomp, the solemnity, and the minuteness of its sacrifices-the wailing cadences, the brisker measures, blended with the awful bursts of its minstrelsy-the temple, with its marble and gold, its pinnacles turned, like the fingers of suppliant hands, to heavenits molten sea, and bulls of brass-its "carved angels, ever eager-eyed," shapes of celestial sculpture--its mercy-seat, so overshadowed, so inviolable, so darkened, amid its glories, by a penumbra of divine anger-the atmosphere of holiness suffused, like strange sunshine, over every bell and breastplate, candlestick and cherub-the typical character which filled even the solitudes of the place with meaning, and shook them with silent eloquence the feeling of expectancy and the air of prophecy which reigned over the whole-all this exerted an influence over the imagination as well as the faith, and cast a more than mortal poetry around a system of ceremonies so unique and profound. Hence the merest details, in Leviticus and Exodus, of these rites, become instinct with imagination, and need neither verse nor figure to add to their naked greatness.

Among the doctrines peculiar to the Jews, and inspiring their genius, we may enumerate the unity of the divine nature, their idea of the divine omnipresence, their expectation of a Messiah, their doctrine of a millennium, and their views of a future state. The doctrine of divine unity, by collecting all the scattered rays of beauty and excellence, from every quarter of

the universe, and condensing them into one overpowering conception, by tracing the innumerable rills of thought and feeling to the fountain of an infinite mind, surpasses the most elegant and ethereal polytheism immeasurably more than the sun does the "cinders of the element." However beautiful the mythology of Greece, as interpreted by Wordsworth-however instinct it was with imagination-although it seemed to breathe a supernatural soul into the creation, to rouse and startle it all into life, to fill the throne of the sun with a divine sovereign, to hide a Naiad in every fountain, to crown every rock with an Oread, to deify shadows and storms, and to send sweeping across the waste of ocean a celestial emperor--it must yield without a struggle to the thought of a great One Spirit, feeding by his perpetual presence the lamp of the universe, speaking in all its voices, listening in all its silence, storming in its rage, reposing in its calm, its light the shadow of his greatness, its gloom the hiding-place of his power, its verdure the trace of his steps, its fire the breath of his nostrils, its motion the circulation of his untiring energies, its warmth the effluence of his love, its mountains the altars of his worship, and its oceans the mirrors where he beholds his form, "glassed in tempests." Compared to those conceptions, how does the fine dream of the Pagan Mythus melt away— Olympus, with its multitude of stately celestial natures, dwindle before the solitary immutable throne of Jehovah-the poetry as well as the philosophy of Greece shrink before the single sentence," Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord"-and Wordsworth's description of the origin of its multitudinous gods looks tame beside the mighty lines of Milton

"The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum,

Runs through the arched roof, in words deceiving.
Apollo, from his shrine,

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.