invention of acuteness,) which mark the slender shades and turnings of a finer mind. On the western side, we find all these things reversed. Whatever may have been the cause, whether it was, as Diodorus says, because their philosophers taught for reward, τῇ κατὰ τὴν ἐργολαβίαν κέρδος στοκαζόμενοι, or, such was the bent of nature, they questioned every thing; supported their discourses by proofs, and not by authority; gave us their systems in connected discourses, and even in poetry taught us to reason, while they compelled us to feel. The European nations have inherited the taste of the Greeks; their language is formed on the basis of the Greek tongue; and had it not been that the Bible, by being translated, has preserved among us some elements of orientalism, we should this day scarcely be capable of holding intercourse with more than half our race. The most literal translations would only throw darkness over the most beautiful page. The Hebrew nation have for ages been remarkable for any thing rather than delicacy or refinement. We cannot conceive of a race of bipeds, more coarse, more callous, more boobyish, more trifling, than the whole race of Jewish literati, into whose hands the Scriptures have fallen. The Bible, with its native commentators around it, is like one of its own islands in the Babylonian desert; you pass over the blazing sand beneath the burning sun, before you reach the grateful shades, and the bubbling spring. But be cause this peculiar nation have shrivelled in captivity, we must not suppose that they were destitute of genius when they flourished in their glory. We might as well take a degenerate Roman as he was described by the Goths, as a semblance of Cicero, as to judge of an ancient Jew, by one of the Masorites. The minds of most men sink to the level of the estimation in which they are held. The despised man becomes despicable; the slave assumes a servile mind. Judea was once the seat of empire and glory. She had her city, her king, and her temple. She had all that expansive power which the mind feels when left to an open career. Her sons mounted up on wings like - eagles; they ran and were not weary, they walked and were not faint. Then the architect labored, the warrior triumphed, and the poet sung. If she rivalled not some other nations in refinement, one excellence no one can deny her bards; and that is-they are always idiomatic; they have qualities and beauties pre-eminently their own. No man can have read the prophets with attention, without observing that one of their chief charms is— they are exquisitely oriental. They write with a mode of thought, and a mode of connecting their thoughts, and with allusions, wholly impossible but to one placed on the spot. If a reader approaches the Hebrew poets with a standard formed in modern times, he will be greatly disappointed. Much has been said of the beauties of the Bible; nor are we aware that its beauties have been overrated. But loosely declaiming on the beauties of the Bible, some fond critics have laid a snare for the reader's dissent. The Bible is beautiful like most other primitive books, in its own peculiar style of beauty. It has those very beauties which a nascent age produces, and of which its sacred subjects are susceptible. It cannot combine those artful images which are the invention of later ages; it cannot sympathize with the voluptuary at his bowls, or the warrior on the field of battle; it cannot introduce the lover, pouring out vows to his mistress; nor surround the trifles of life with the mythology of gods or fairies. It cannot address our imagination on the inflammable side of passion, or lead us through descriptions which pamper the heart. All these ends, the awful severity of its subjects refuses. But its beauties are the fruits of its theme. They are flowers of its own soil. They are implements to impress its own lessons. They are pictures of the age, and the men, and the subject. Passing from such a writer as Thomas More, for example, to the Bible, there is an amazing contrast; and the reader who has melted at the tawdry sentimentalism of the Irish bard, (not without his beauties, we confess,) would at first be shocked at the stern simplicity of Ezekial or Isaiah. But has the Bible therefore no beauties? Must every subject be ornamented alike? Must a colossal statue have the coloring of a miniature picture? It was no more to be expected that the Bible should have these modern manners, than that the Jordan or the Euphrates, should reflect the trees or the shrubbery on the banks of the Ohio or the Tweed. THE PURITAN. No. 34. But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made to appear, over all the kinds of lyric poesy, to be incomparable. Milton against Prelaty, Book II., Introduction. ONE of the pleasures of poetry, is the skill and facility with which the author overcomes certain difficulties, which the rules of the art impose upon him. It is not copying nature, or painting the passions solely, which gives us delight; but it is the adroitness with which these things are done, though the work was hampered by certain laws. In certain kinds of verse, this is the chief pleasure. It is peculiarly so in the Spenserian stanza, and in the sonnet; and in those artful involutions and balanced periods, which some writers use. For example, in these lines in |