These remarks imply that art, though subordi nate, was not neglected, as indeed is proved by the noble relics which have come down to us, and in which the art is only relatively small and low—that is, the art is inconsiderable and secondary, merely because the topics are so august, the sentiments so grand, the religious impression so profound and sacred. At later periods, when the first fresh gushing of the muse had ceased, art in Hebrew, as is the case in all other poetry, began to claim a larger share of attention, and stands in the poems for a greater portion of their merit. Then the play of the imagination grew predominant over the spontaneous outpourings of the soul, and among other creations of the fancy alphabetical poems were produced, in which the matter is artisti cally distributed sometimes under two-and-twenty heads or divisions, corresponding with the number of the Hebrew letters. This is of course a pecu liarity which cannot be preserved in any ordinary prose translation ; but it is indicated in Ps. cxix. as found in the common Bibles ; and other speci mens may be seen in Ps. ix. x. xxv. xxxiv. xxxvii cxi. cxii.
If now, from these details we consider for a moment what are the essential peculiarities of Hebrew poetry, we find we have to offer to the reader's attention the following observations.
The source of all true poetry is in the human mind. Even where there is a divine inspiration, this higher element must enter into the soul of man, and, blending with its workings, conform also to its laws. But every thought is not poetical. Thought and emotion become poetical only when they rise to the ideal. Poetry, in its source, is thought which ascends to a high if not perfect (relatively) conception of moral and spiritual real ities. Mere intensity is not poetry, any more than strength of muscle is beauty. Still less is passion either poetry or eloquence, as Blair teaches. Passion is of a suspicious origin, and represents the soul as being mastered ; whereas in all true poetry the soul is a sovereign. There may be in tensity in poetry, however, and the soul, when in a poetic state, may be impassioned; but these are only accidents—results, not causes, ensuing (some times) from the ideal conceptions which for the time being constitute the soul, and make up con sciousness. Hence all true poetry is religious ; for religion is the contemplation of the highest perfection as at once holy, lovely, honourable, formative, and guiding, the object of adoration, the fountain of law, the source of obligation. But in the Hebrew poetry, the religion which constituted its essence had attributes of truth and reality such as no other poetry ever did or could possess. The
intimate relation in which the nation of Israel, and the still more intimate relation in which distin guished individuals of that nation, stood to the Deity, made the religious the predominant ele ment, and gave to that element a living and quick ening fire as from heaven, which burnt from the first with the true vestal purity, and on to the last with more than vestal constancy and duration. A divine and imperishable power was thus the chief constituent of Hebrew poetry : divine truth, divine energy, divine life, are all found in the earliest productions of Hebrew song. Its chief charac teristic—that by which, more than any other thing, it is contradistinguished from the poetry of all other nations—is its pure and rich religious element.
But this divine power lay not merely in the truths conveyed, nor in the facts commemorated by the songs of Zion, but equally in the strong, deep, and overflowing emotions with which the Hebrew harp thrilled sometimes to ecstasy. The origin of this religious sensibility is to be chiefly looked for in the Hebrew temperament, which was and is peculiarly rich in all the sentiments of the heart, so that devotion was as natural—as much a necessity of the character of the Israelites —as domestic affection. It is in the main owing to the religious and devotional qualities of Hebrew poetry that the Book of Psalms still, after the lapse of so many centuries, and the rise and fall of so many modes of thought and forms of social life, holds an empire over the heart of man, far wider, deeper, and more influential than what any other influence has possessed, save only that which is and will ever be exercised by David's greater son.' Nor is the wonder at all diminished when we learn that the Hebrew was an essentially national muse. There is no poetry which bears a deeper or broader stamp of the peculiar influences under which it was produced. It never ceases to be Hebrew in order to become universal, and yet it is universal while it is Hebrew. The country, the clime, the institutions, the very peculiar religious institutions, rites, and observances, the very sin gular religious history of the Israelites, are all faithfully and vividly reflected in the Hebrew muse, so that no one song can ever be mistaken for a poem of any other people. Still it remains true that the heart of man, at least the heart of all the most civilised nations of the earth, has been moved and swayed, and is still pleasingly and most bene ficially moved and swayed by the strains of Biblical poesy. Others may, but we cannot, account for this indubitable fact, without admitting that some specially divine influence was in operation amidst the Jews.