The stranger's bread with bitter tears we steep, The born in sorrow shall bring forth in joy; Thy mercy, Lord, shall lead thy children home; He that went forth a tender yearling boy, Yet, ere he die, to Salem's streets shall come. And Canaan's vines for us their fruits shall bear, And Hermon's bees their honeyed stores prepare; And we shall kneel again in thankful prayer, Where, o'er the cherub-seated God, full blazed the irradiate dome. MILMAN. XXXIII. DANIE L. LIJAH, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, with other of the great seers of the Old Testament, were prophets and little else. Daniel belongs to a different order of men. He was chief counselor in a great empire. They seem to have been poor, solitary and wandering men, despised and rejected; he was the favorite of monarchs. Their predictions exposed them to danger and shame; his "dreams" drew him aloft to riches and honor. They were admitted now and then among princes because they were prophets, but his power of prophecy made him a prince. Their predictions came generally naked to their waking eyes-they were day-dreams-but his were often softened and shaded by the mist of sleep. And yet we feel justified in putting the well-conditioned and gold-hung Daniel beside the gaunt, hungry and wild-eyed sons of the prophets. Souls, and dark piercing eyes expressing similar souls, are kindred, whether they burn beneath the brows of beggars or of kings. "Sleep on," said an unhappy literary man over the dust of Bunyan, in Bunhill-fields, "thou prince of dreamers." Prince the third he was; for while Joseph is the first, Daniel is the second, monarch in this dim dynasty. His pillow was at times a throne the throne of his genius, the throne of empires and of all future ages. His imagination, fettered during the day by the cares of state, launched out at night into the sea of futurity, and brought home, from its remotest shores, spoils of which we are only yet learning the value and the meaning. It was by understanding the cipher of his own dreams that he learned to expound that of others. As the poet is the best, nay, only true, critic of poetry as the painter can best understand pictures, and the orator best appreciate, whoever else may feel, eloquence—the dreamer alone can expound dreams. "A dream is from God" is one of the earliest, shortest and truest of sentences. Strange, stuttering, imperfect, but real and direct messengers from the Infinite, are our dreams. Like wornout couriers, dying with their news at the threshold of the door, dreams seem sometimes unable to utter their tidings. Or is it rather that we do not yet understand their language, and must often thus lay missives aside which contain at once our duty and our destiny? The dreaming world—as the region where all elements are mingled, all contradictions reconciled, all tenses lost in one-supplies us with the only faint conception we have of that awful Now in which the Eternal dwells. In every dream does not the soul, like a stream, sink transiently into the deep. abyss whence it came, and where it is to merge at death? and are not the confusion and incoherence of dreams just the hubbub, the foam and the struggle with which the river weds the ocean? But all dreams which ever waved rapture over the brow of youthful genius, dreaming of love or heaven, or which ever dis tilled poison on the drugged and desperate repose of unhappy bard or philosopher who has experienced the "pains of sleep," or cried aloud, as he awoke in struggles, "I shall sleep no more," must yield in magnitude, grandeur and comprehensiveness to the dreams which Daniel expounded or saw. They are all colossal in size, as befitted dreams dreamed in the palace of Babylon. Let us look at the history of this great and almost faultless. From out of the crowd of Jewish captives whom Nebuchadnezzar, after the conquest of Palestine, carried to Babylon, he caused a certain number of youths of highest rank, among whom was Daniel, who was of the royal line, to be selected, in man. order that, after being educated in the palace, and instructed in all the learning of the times, they might be employed in services about his person. Being furnished, as was customary, with rich viands from the royal table, of which, however, they could not partake without violating the ceremonial law which God had imposed upon his people, Daniel applied for, and, not without some difficulty and hazard, obtained, permission for himself and his companions to use coarser food, and thenceforth voluntarily submitted to a course of life rigidly abstemious, that he might not disobey the commands of Heaven. Having early distinguished himself by his singular progress in learning, so that he speedily came to be ranked in the class of the wise or learned men of the country, and having recommended himself to those about him by the strict propriety of his conduct, he was soon furnished with an opportunity of displaying attainments of a higher order than any which human favor or skill can bestow. Nebuchadnezzar, having been visited with one of those visions of the night by means of which the omniscient God, in times previous to the gospel revelation, was wont to evince his providence and supreme administration, sought relief from the agitation into which the prophetic dream had plunged his proud spirit by demanding, with threats, from his wise men, not only an interpretation of the dream, but a relation of its circumstances, which, in the perturbed state of his mind, had escaped from his memory. In the denunciations of death which the infuriated monarch issued against those from whom he hoped to extort this superhuman information, Daniel with his companions was involved; and having obtained, by his prayers, from Him who alone could give it, a revelation of the mysterious vision, he was enabled to recall to Nebuchadnezzar's recollection the particulars of it, and to furnish the interpretation, accompanying his disclosures with a faithful and fearless exhortation to the monarch to acknowledge the supremacy of that God to whose inspiration alone Daniel ascribed his knowledge of the mystery. On a subsequent occasion of a similar kind, Daniel, now advanced to high rank in the state, was called upon to declare to the same sovereign the decree of the Most High which had gone forth against him, that for his arrogant usurpation of the divine prerogative, and refusal to acknowledge the one living and true God, he should for a time be deprived of reason, and degraded from the height of his grandeur to the level of the brute creation. In this trying juncture he hesitated not to hazard his honors and his life, by faithfully disclosing the counsels of Heaven and recommending to the proud monarch humiliation and repentance: "This is the interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the Most High, that thou shalt be driven from the society of men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, till seven times shall pass over thee, and thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdoms of men, and giveth them to whom he will. Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to thee, and break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquillity." A still more awful judgment of Heaven it fell to Daniel's lot to denounce against the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, and last monarch of his line, when Babylon was now besieged by the victorious arms of the Persians and Medes; nor, in declaring to the dissolute Belshazzar the import of the handwriting upon the palace wall, did he swerve from that uprightness and fidelity to his God which had hitherto guided his conduct on similar emergencies. "Thou hast lifted up thyself," said this intrepid servant, "against the Lord of heaven, and the God in whose hand thy breath is hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this is the interpretation of the thing: God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians." "In that night was Belshazzar slain; and Darius the Median," |