How different, and how much more striking, the glimpses in Scripture, penciled, as through chinks in the wall of the mansion of the second death! Its locality is untold, its creation and date are left in obscurity, its names are various-but all rather vails than discoveries of what seems elaborately concealed. It s hell, the hidden or sunken place; it is Gehenna, Tophet; it is a smoke ascending, as if to darken the universe; it is a lake' burning with fire and brimstone, but of which the interior is unseen; it is a pit bottomless, a fire unquenchable, a worm undying, a death--the second and the last; it is "without," yet not unvisited or unseen; they shall be tormented in the presence of the Lamb and the holy angels; they shall go forth, and look on the carcasses of them that are slain, whose worm dieth not. This is all, or nearly all we know of it. And yet how unspeakably tremendous! Like the disjointed words upon the wall (in Coleridge's "Dream") taken singly, each word is a riddle-put them together, and what a lesson of lurid terror do they combine to teach! And from such pregnant expressions have come forth, accordingly, all the sublime and dreary dreams of after-poetry, the savage sculpture of Dante, Milton's broad pictures, Pollok's bold sketch, and the whole gallery of gloomy visions which may be found in our great religious prose-authors, from Jeremy Taylor to Thomas Aird.

The next influence we mention, as operating on the Hebrew poets, is the climate and scenery of their country. To be susceptible of such skyey influences is one main distinction between genius and mere talent, and also between the enthusiast and the fanatic. There is a vulgar earnestness which, while addressing a multitude amid the most enchanting scenery, and at the spiritual hour of evening, would feel no elevation, but bellow on as before, susceptible only to the animal sympathy arising from the concourse of human beings, and not at all to the gradual shading in of the sky over that sea of faces, to the voice of the distant streams, and to the upper congregation of the stars, coming out, as if they too would listen to the Gospel of glad tidings. Not thus was Paul unaware of the scene, at Mars Hill, as he

preached Jesus and the resurrection. Not thus indifferent was Edward Irving to the glories of the Frith of Forth, as again and again, in the open air and in full view of them, "rolled the rich thunder of his awful voice," to thousands of silent men. Even the more literal soul of Whitefield caught occasionally in such scenes a glow of enthusiasm, and the coarse current of his thought and diction was tinged with a gleam of poetry. It is vain to say that some men will, nay, ought to be so swallowed up in their subject, as to remember nothing besides. Religion, on the contrary, is a subject which, if properly presented, will challenge, as its own, alike the splendors of earth and heaven, and the voice of the true poet-preacher will appear, as it rises and swells with the theme, worthy of concerting with the eldest harmonies of nature. Those modes, on the other hand, of presenting religious truth, which, amid beautiful scenery and seasons of special spiritual interest, seem harsh, hard, unsuitable, which jar upon the musical sweetness and incense breathing all around, and of which the echo sounds from above like a scream of laughter, contradiction, and scorn, are therein proved to be imperfect, if not false. They are not in unison with the spirit of the surrounding universe, but are rejected and flung back by it as foul or rabid falsehoods.

The Hebrew prophets lived in the eye of nature. We always figure them with cheeks embrowned by the noons of the East. The sun had looked on them, but it was lovingly-the moon had "smitten" them, but it was with poetry, not madnessthey had drank in fire, the fire of Eastern day, from a hundred sources-from the lukewarm brooks of their land, from the rich colors of their vegetation, from their mornings of unclouded brightness, from their afternoons of thunder, from the large stars of their evenings and nights. The heat of their climate was strong enough to enkindle but not to enervate their frames, inured as they were to toil, fatigue, fasting, and frequent travel. They dwelt in a land of hills and valleys, of brooks and streams, of spots of exuberant vegetation, of iron-ribbed rocks and mountains-a land, on one side, dipping down in the Mediterranean

Sea, on another, floating up into Lebanon, and on the others, edged by deserts, teeming at once with dreadful scenery and secrets-through which had passed of old time the march of the Almighty, and where his anger had left for its memorials, here, the sandy sepulcher of those thousands whose carcasses fell in the wilderness, and there, a whole Dead Sea of vengeance, lowering amid a desolation, fit to be the very gateway of hell -standing between their song and subject-matter, and such a fiery clime, and such stern scenery-the Hebrew bards were enabled to indite a LANGUAGE more deeply dyed in the colors of the sun, more intensely metaphorical, more faithfully transcriptive of nature, a simpler, and yet larger utterance, than ever before or since rushed out from the heart and tongue of

man.

And not merely were there thus certain general features connected with the leading events in Old Testament history, with the peculiar doctrines of the Jews, and with the climate and scenery of their country, which secured the existence of poetry, but the very construction and characteristics of the Hebrew tongue were favorable to its birth. Destitute of the richness and infinite flexibility of the Greek, the artificial stateliness and strength of the Latin, and the varied resources and borrowed beauties of modern languages, Adam's tongue-the language of the early giants of the species-was fitted, beyond them all, for the purposes of lofty poetry. It was, in the first place, as Herder well calls it, an abyss of verbs; and there is no part of speech so well adapted as the verb to express motion, energetic action, quick transition, and strong endurance. This language was no quiet or sullen sea, but all alive, speaking, surging, now bursting in breaker, and now heaving in long deep swell. Its adjectives were borrowed from verbs, served their purposes, and did their work; and, though barren in abstract terms, it was none the less adapted for the purposes of poetry; for it abounded in sensuous terms-it swarmed with words descriptive of the objects of nature. It contains, amid its apparent inopia verborum, more than two hundred and fifty

botanical terms; and, then, its utterance, more than that of any other tongue, was a voice from the heart. We sometimes hear orators who appear to speak with the lungs, instead of the lips; but the Hebrews heaved up their rage and their joy, their grief and their terror, from the depths of their hearts. By their frequent use, too, of the present tense, they have unconsciously contributed to the picturesque and powerful effect of their writings. This has quickened their every page, and made their words, if we may so speak, to stand on end.

It may, indeed, be objected to Hebrew poetry, that it has no regular rhythm, except a rude parallelism. What then? Must it be, therefore, altogether destitute of music? Has not the rain a rhythm of its own, as it patters on the pane, or sinks on the bosom of its kindred pool? Hath not the wind a harmony, as it bows the groaning woods, or howls over the mansions of the dead? Have not the waves of ocean their wild base? Has not the thunder its own "deep and dreadful organ-pipe?" Do they speak in rhyme? Do they murmur in blank verse? Who taught them to begin in Iambics, or to close in Alexandrines? And shall not God's own speech have a peculiar note, no more barbarous than is the voice of the old woods or the older cataracts?

Besides, to call parallelism a coarse or uncouth rhythm, betrays an ignorance of its nature. Without entering at large on the subject of Hebrew versification, we may ask any one, who has paid even a slight attention to the subject, if the effect, whether of the gradational parallel, in which the second or responsive clause rises above the first, like the round of a ladder, as in the 1st Psalm

"Blessed is the man

That hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,

Nor stood in the way of sinners:

And hath not sat in the seat of the scornful;"

or the antithetical parallel, in which two lines correspond with each other, by an opposition of terms and sentiments, as in the words

"The memory of the just is blessed,

But the name of the wicked shall rot;"

or the constructive parallel, in which word does not answer to word, nor sentence, as equivalent or opposite, but there is a correspondence and equality between the different propositions, in the turn and shape of the whole sentence, and of the constructive parts-noun answering to noun, verb to verb, negative to negative, interrogation to interrogation, as in the 19th Psalm

"The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul;

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;"

or, finally, the introverted parallel, in which, whatever be the number of lines, the first runs parallel with the last, the second with the penultimate, and so throughout, such as—

"My son, if thine heart be wise,

My heart shall rejoice, even mine;
Yea, my reins shall rejoice

When thy lips speak right things-"

We ask, if the effect of all these, perpetually intermingled as they are, be not to enliven the composition, often to give distinctness and precision to the train of thought, to impress the sentiments upon the memory, and to give out a harmony, which, if inferior to rhyme in the compression produced by the difficulty (surmounted) of uniting varied sense with recurring sound, and in the pleasure of surprise; and to blank verse, in freedom, in the effects produced by the variety of pause, and in the force of long and linked passages, as well as of insulated lines, is less slavish than the one, and less arbitrary than the other? Unlike rhyme, its point is more that of thought than of language; unlike blank verse, it never can, however managed, degenerate into heavy prose. Such is parallelism, which generally forms the differential quality of the poetry of Scripture, although there are many passages in it destitute of this aid, and which yet in the spirit they breathe, and the metaphors by which they are garnished, are genuine and high poetry. And there can be little