Egypt-lonely while herding his flock in the wilderness-lonely while climbing Mount Sinai-lonely on the summit, and lonely when descending the sides of the hill-lonely in his death, and lonely in his burial. Even while mingling with the multitudes of Israel, he remained secluded and alone. As the glory which shone on his face insulated him for a time from men, so did all his life his majestic nature. He was among men, but not of them. Stern incarnation of the anger of Omnipotence, thy congenial companions were not Aaron, nor Joshua, nor Zipporah, but the rocks and caves of Horeb, the fiery pillar, the bush burning, the visible glory of the sanctuary, the lightningwreaths round Sinai's sullen brow, and all other red symbols. of Jehovah's presence! With such, like a kindred fire upon one funeral pile, didst thou gloomily embrace and hold still communion! Shade of power not yet perished-sole lord of millions still, wielding the two tables as the scepters of thy extant sovereignty, with thy face flashing back the splendors of the Divine eye, and seeming to descend evermore thy "Thunder-hill of Fear"-it is with a feeling of awful reverence that we bid thee farewell!

CHAPTER V.

POETRY OF THE BOOK OF JOB.

BE the author of the book of Job who he may, he was not Moses. Nothing can be more unlike the curt and bare simplicity of Moses' style, than the broad-blown magnificence of Job. It is like one severe feather, compared to the outspread wing of an eagle. Moses had seen many countries and many men, had studied many sciences, and passed through numerous adventures, which tamed, yet strung his spirit. The author of Job is a contemplative enthusiast, who, the greater part of his life, had been girt in by the rocks of his country, and who, from glowing sand below, and glittering crag around, and torrid sky above, had clothed his spirit and his language with a barbaric splendor. He is a prince, but a prince throned in a wilderness—a sage, but his wisdom has been taught him in the library of the everlasting hills--a poet, but his song is untaught and unmodified by art or learning, as that in which the nightingale hails the hush of evening. The geography of the land of Job is a commentary on its poetry. Conceive a land lorded over by the sun, when lightning, rushing in, like an angry painter, did not dash his wild colors across the landscape; a land ever in extremes-now dried up as in a furnace, now swimming with loud waters—its sky the brightest or the blackest of heavens desolate crags rising above rank vegetationbeauty adorning the brow of barrenness-shaggy and thundersplit hills surrounding narrow valleys and water-courses; a land for a great part bare in the wrath of nature, when not swaddled in sudden tempest and whirlwind; a land of lions, and wild

goats, and wild asses, and ostriches, and hawks stretching toward the south, and horses clothed with thunder, and eagles making their nests on high; a land through whose transparent air night looked down in all her queenlike majesty, all her most lustrous ornaments on-the south blazing through all its chambers as with solid gold-the north glorious with Arcturus and his sons-the zenith crowning the heavens with a diadem of white, and blue, and purple stars. Such the land in which. this author lived, such the sky he saw; and can we wonder that poetry dropped on and from him, like rain from a thick tree; and that grandeur-a grandeur almost disdaining beauty, preferring firmaments to flowers, making its garlands of the whirlwind became his very soul. The book of Job shows a mind smit with a passion for nature, in her simplest, most solitary, and elementary forms-gazing perpetually at the great shapes of the material universe, and reproducing to us the infant infinite wonder with which the first inhabitants of the world must have seen their first sunrise, their first thunderstorm, their first moon waning, their first midnight heaven expanding, like an arch of triumph, over their happy heads. One object of the book is to prophesy of nature-to declare its testimony to the Most High-to unite the leaves of its trees, the wings of its fowls, the eyes of its stars, in one act of adoration to Jehovah. August undertaking, and meet for one reared in the desert, anointed with the dew of heaven, and by God himself inspired.

If any one word can express the merit of the natural descriptions in Job, it is the word gusto. You do something more than see his behemoth, his war-horse, and his leviathan: you touch, smell, hear, and handle them too. It is no shadow of the object he sets before you, but the object itself, in its length, breadth, height, and thickness. In this point, he is the Landseer of ancient poetry, and something more. That great painter seems, every one knows, to become the animal he is paintingto intermingle his soul for a season with that of the stag, the horse, or the bloodhound. So Job, with the war-horse, swal

lows the ground with fierceness and rage-with behemoth, moves his tail like a cedar-with the eagle, smells the slain afar off, and screams with shrill and far-heard joy. In the presence of Landseer's figures, you become inspired by the pervading spirit of the picture-you start back, lest his sleeping bloodhound awake you feel giddy beside his stag on the brow of the mountain-you look at his greyhound's beauty, almost with the admiration which he might be supposed to feel, glancing at his own figure, during his leap across the stream. Job's animals seem almost higher than nature's. You hear God describing and panegyrizing his own works, and are not ashamed to feel yourself pawing and snorting with his charger-carrying away your wild scorn and untamable freedom, with the ostrich, into the wilderness-or, with behemoth, drawing in Jordan into your mouth. It may be questioned if Landseer has the very highest imagination-if he be not rather a literal than an ideal painter-if he could, or durst, go down after Jonah into the whale, or exchange souls with the mammoth or megatherium? Job uniformly transcends, while sympathizing with his subjects -casts on them a light not their own, as from the "eyelids of the morning;" and the greater the subject is, he occupies and fills it with the more ease: he dandles his leviathan like a kid. Landseer we have charged, elsewhere, with almost an inhuman sympathy with brutes; and a moral or religious lesson can with difficulty be gathered from his pictures-his dying deer would tempt you, by their beauty, to renew the tragedy; but Deus est anima brutorum hangs suspended over Job's colossal drawings, and, as in fable, all his animals utter a moral while passing on before you. Near those descriptions of his, we can place nothing in picture, prose, or poetry, save such lines in Milton as that describing leviathan—

"Whom God

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream;"

or Blake's lines

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the deserts of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Framed thy fearful symmetry?"

Besides those natural descriptions, the poetic elements in Job may be included under the following:-The scene in heaven, the calamities of Job, his first expression of anguish, the vision of Eliphaz, the moral pictures which abound, the praise of Wisdom, the entrance of the Deity, the beauty of the close, and, above all, the great argument pervading the whole. The scene in heaven has always been admired, and often imitated. It struck Byron much; particularly the thought of Satan being actually brought back, as by an invisible chain, to the court of heaven, and compelled to witness its felicity, and subserve the purposes of God. Shelley, again, meditated a tragedy on the subject, which would have been, probably, a very daring and powerful accommodation of Job to his own unhappy notions. Goethe, in his "Faust," and Bayley, in his "Festus," have both imitated this scene. It abounds at once in poetic interest and profound meaning. Job has previously been pictured sitting in peace and prosperity under his vine and fig-tree. He has little about him to excite any peculiar interest. Suddenly the blue curtain of the sky over his head seems to open, the theater of the highest heaven expands, and of certain great transactions there he becomes the unconscious center. What a background now has that still figure! Thus every man always is the hero of a triumph or a tragedy as wide as the universe. Thus "each” is always linked to "all." Thus above each world, too, do heaven and hell stand continually, like the dark and the bright suns of astronomy, and the planets between them. In that highest heaven, a day has dawned of solemn conclave. From their thousand missions of justice and mercy return the sons of God, to report their work and their tidings; and inasmuch as their work has been done, their aspects are equally tranquil, whether their tidings are evil or good. But, behind them,

"A spirit of a different aspect waved

His wings, like thunderclouds, above some coast,