"There is room in us-room for the travelers who explore our sands or our snows-room for the caravans that carry their merchandise across our dreadful solitudes." The depth of the ocean says "Thousands have gone down within me—nay, an entire world has become the prey of my waters, still my caverns are not crowded; yet there is room." The heart of the earth has a voice-a hollow voice-and says-" What are Korah and his company to me? I am empty; yet there is room." Do not all the graves compose thus one melancholy chorus, and say-"Yet there is room; room for thee, thou maiden, adorned with virtue and loveliness; room for thee, thou aged man; room for thee, thou saint, as surely as there was room for thy Savior; room for thee, thou sinner, as surely as thy kindred before thee have laid themselves and their iniquities down in the dust; room for all, for all must in us at last lie down."

But is this sad cry to resound forever? No; for we are listening for a mightier voice, which is yet to pierce the cold ear of death, and drown the dull monotony of the grave. How magnificent, even were they fictitious, but how much more, as recording a fact, the words-" All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth." To what voices do the dead not listen! Music can charm the serpent, but it can not awaken the dead. The voice of an orator can rouse a nation to frenzy, but let him try his eloquence on the dead, and a hollow echo will rebuke his folly. The thunder in the heavens can appall a city, but there is one spot in it where it excites no alarm, and that spot is the tomb.

"The lark's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more arouse them from their narrow bed."

There is but one voice which the dead will hear. It is that voice which shall utter the words—“ Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead."

Was it a sublime spectacle, when, at the cry, "Lazarus, come forth," the dead man appeared at the mouth of the sepulcher,

the hue of returning life on his cheek, forming a strange contrast to his white grave-clothes? What, then, shall be said of the coming forth of innumerable Lazaruses, of the whole congregation of the dead-the hermit rising from his solitary grotto, the soldier from his field of blood, the sailor from his sea-sepulcher, the shepherd from his mountain-grave? To see -as in the season of spring, the winged verdure climbs the mountain, clothes the plain, flushes the forest, adorns the brink and the brow of the precipice-in this second spring, a torrent of life passing over the world, and living men coming forth, where all before had been silence, desolation, and death; to see the volcano disgorging the dead which were in him, and the earthquake relaxing his jaws, and giving back the dead which were in him, and the sullen tarn restoring her lawful captives, and the ocean unrolling and revealing the victims of her “innermost main," and the Seine disclosing her suicidal prey, and the wastes and wildernesses becoming unretentive of their longconcealed dead-every pore quickening into life, every grave becoming a womb. This is the spectacle of the Christian resurrection—a spectacle but once to be beheld, but to be remembered forever-a spectacle which every eye shall witness-a spectacle around which a universe shall gather with emotions of uncontrollable astonishment and of fearful joy.

The New Testament stands and shines in the luster of this expectation. So important is the place of resurrection in the system, that Jesus identifies himself with it, saying "I am the resurrection and the life." And from his empty grave floods of meaning, hope, and beauty, flow forth over the New Testament page. The Lord's day, too, forms a link connecting the rising of Christ with that of his people, and is covered with the abundance both of the first-fruits and of the full harvest.

Among the incidents in the life of Christ, there are several of an intensely poetical character. We shall mention here the Transfiguration. This singular event did not take place, as commonly supposed, on Tabor. Tabor was then the seat of a Roman military fort. It took place on a high, nameless moun

tain, probably in Galilee. It was seemingly on the Sabbathday ("After six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John, up into a high mountain apart") that this grand exception to the tenor of Christ's earthly history was manifested. It was a rehearsal of his Ascension. His form, which had been bent under a load of sorrow (a bend more glorious than the bend of the rainbow), now erected itself, like the palm-tree from pressure, and he became like unto a "pillar in the temple of his God." His brow expanded; its wrinkles of care fled, and the sweatdrops of his climbing toil were transmuted into sparks of glory. His eye flashed forth, like the sun from behind a cloud—nay, his whole frame became transparent, as if it were one eye. The light which had long lain in it concealed was now unvailed in full effulgence: "His face did shine as the sun." His very raiment was caught in a shower of radiance, and became white as no fuller on earth could whiten it; and who shall describe the luster of his streaming hair, or the eloquent silence of that smile which sate, like the love of God, upon his lips?

"What hill is like to Tabor hill, in beauty and in fame,

For there, in sad days of his flesh, o'er Christ a glory came,
And light o'erflowed him like a sea, and raised his shining brow,
And the voice came forth, which bade all worlds the Son of God
avow ?"

This radiance passed away. The glory of the transfigured Jesus faded as the red cloud fades in the west, when the sun has set. (And how could the disciples bear the change? And yet, as Christ, in his coronation robes, had seemed, perhaps, distant and strange to them, did not his returning self appear dearer, if less splendid, than his glorified humanity?) But the glory did not pass without leaving a mild reflex upon the page of Scripture. "We were with him in the holy mount," says Peter; and was not the transfigured Christ in his eye when he speaks immediately after of "The day-star arising in our hearts?" And John's picture of Christ in the Apocalypse, is a

colossal copy of the figure he had seen on the holy mount, vibrating between dust and Deity, at once warm as humanity, and glorious as God.

As producing or controlling the poetry of the New Testament, next to the resurrection, stands the incarnation. " Will God in very deed dwell with men upon the earth?" Will God, above all, dwell in a form of human flesh, and so dwell, that we must say of it, "God is here," nay, "this is God?" Is there found a point where the finite and the infinite meet, mingle without confusion, marry without compulsion, and is this point the Man of Galilee? In fact, the incarnation and poetry bear a resemblance. Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty. The incarnation is the Word "made" holy and beauteous" flesh." Poetry is the everlasting descent of the Jupiter of the True into the arms of the Danae of the Beautiful, in a shower of Gold. The incarnation is God the Spirit, descending on Jesus the perfect man, like a dove, and abiding upon and within him. The difference is, that while the truth of Jesus is entirely moral, that of poetry is more varied; and that while the one incarnation is personal and real, the other is hypothetical and ideal. Man and God have rhymed together; and the glorious couplet is, "the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh."

From this fact have sprung the matchless antitheses and climaxes of Paul's prose poetry, Peter's fervid meditations on the glory of Christ, and John's pantings of love toward the "Man God," on whose bosom he had leaned, and whose breath had made him forever warm.

But, without dwelling on other circumstances modifying New Testament poetry, we pass to speak, in the next chapter, of the Poetry of the Gospels, and of that transcendent poet who died on Calvary.

CHAPTER XIII.

POETRY OF THE GOSPELS.

PERHAPS we had better have designated this chapter "The Poetry of Jesus," for nearly all the poetry in the four Evangelists clusters in, around his face, form, bearing, and words.

The word "character," as applied to Jesus, is a misnomer. Character seems generally to mean something outstanding from the being a kind of dress worn outwardly; at best, a faint index to the qualities within. Thus, to say of a man, “he has a good moral character," is to say little. You still ask, what is he? what is the nature of his being? to what order does he belong? is he of the earth earthy, or born from above? It is of Christ's being, not his character, that we would speak, while seeking to show its essential poetry.

The company of the disciples in the "Acts," have answered, by anticipation, all questions about Christ's being, in the memorable words, "thy holy child, Jesus." He was a child-a holy child—a divine child—an eternal child. He seems still to sit "among the doctors," with Zoroaster, and Moses, and Confucius, and Socrates, and Plato, ranged around him, "both hearing them and asking them questions," while they, like the sheaves of Joseph's brethren, are compelled to bow down before the noble boy. His sermons, possessing no logical sequence and coherence, are the utterances of a divine infant; the tongue is just a produced heart; and his words flow up, in irregular yet calm succession, from the depth below. And yet all he says is, "like an angel, vital everywhere," and each word is a whole. Like jewels from a crown, the sentences drop down