humidity. Nevertheless fifty or sixty words exhaust the vocabulary of the English tongue in this watery department. More than this number are not easily producible, either from our writers, or from colloquial usage. With this number our poets have contented themselves, from Chaucer to these times. France is also a sea-girt land, and it is well watered; but its vocables of this class are not more in number than our own. But now, although a portion only of the language of the Hebrew people has come down to us in the canonical books, this portion brings to our knowledge as many as fifty words of this one class: it is not to be doubted that in the colloquial parlance of the people many more words had place; - as many, probably, as would fully sustain our affirmation as to the comparative copiousness of this tongue. In allowing sixty words of this class to the English language, many are included which are technical or geographical, rather than natural or colloquial, and which are rarely occurrent in literature seldom, if ever, in religious writings. Such are the words - Roadstead, Estuary, Watershed (American) Lock, Canal, Drain, Bight.

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to

There is yet another ground of comparison on which an estimate may be formed of the relative copiousness of languages. It is that which is afforded by collating a translation with the original-in this manner take as an instance the class of words already referred to. The Hebrew Lexicon, as we have said, gives us as many as fifty words or phrases which are representa

tive of natural objects of this one class; and each of

these terms has if we may take the testimony of lexicographers a well defined meaning of its own. We have then to inquire by how many words are these fifty represented in the Authorized English version. We find in this version twenty-five words answering for the fifty of the Hebrew - apparently because the English language, at the date of this version, did not furnish a better choice. In very many places the same English word does duty for five, six, or seven Hebrew words each of which has a noticeable significance of its own, and might fairly claim to be represented in a translation. As for instance the three words River, Brook, Spring, are employed as a sufficient rendering of eight or ten Hebrew words, each of which conveyed its proper sense to the Hebrew ear, and might not well have given place to a more generic, or less distinctive

term.

A collation of the Greek of the Septuagint- say, in any one of the descriptive Psalms - will give a result equally significant, we think more so, as evidence of what may be called the picturesque or the poetic copiousness of this ancient language; and in a note at the end of the volume the reader who may wish to pursue the suggestions here thrown out will find some further aid in doing so.

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The conclusion with which we are here concerned is this That, whereas the ancient Palestine was a land richly furnished with the materials of a metaphoric and

poetic literature, so were the people of a temperament and of habitudes such as made them vividly conscious of the distinctive features of the material world, as these were presented to them in their every-day life abroad. As proof sufficient of these averments we appeal, first, to the obvious characteristics of their extant literature; and then, to the fact of the richness, and the copiousness, and the picturesque distinctiveness of their language, which in these respects well bears comparison with other languages, ancient or modern.

CHAPTER V.

THE TRADITION OF A PARADISE IS THE GERM OF

POETRY.

HE GOLDEN conception of a Paradise is the

THE

the

Poet's guiding thought. This bright Idea, which has suffused itself among the traditions of Eastern and of Western nations in many mythical forms, presents itself in the Mosaic books in the form of substantial history; and the conception, as such, is entirely Biblical. Genuine Poetry follows where a true Theology leads way; and the one as well as the other must have Truth in History - -as its teacher and companion. It is in the style and mode of a true history that we receive the theologic principle of a Creation which was faultless, at the first. The beginning of history thus coincides with that first axiom of Religion which affirms all things to be of God, and all perfect. A morning hour of the human system there was when man male and female- unconscious of evil, and unlearned in suffering, was inheritor of immortality. In this belief Piety takes its rise; and in this conception of the tranquil plentitude of earthly good-a summer's day of hours unnumbered and unclouded - Poetry has its

source; and toward this Idea retained as a dim hope

it is ever prone to revert.

The true Poet is the man

in whose constitution the tendency so to revert to this Idea is an instinct born with him, and with whom it has become a habit, and an inspiration.

Whatever it may be, within the compass of Poetry, that is the most resplendent, and whatever it is that awakens the profoundest emotions - whether they be joyful or sorrowful-whatever it is that breathes tenderness, as well as whatever kindles hope-draws its power so to touch the springs of feeling from the same latent conception of a perfectness and a happiness possible to man, and which, when it is set forth in words, presents itself as a tradition of Paradise. Poetry, of any class, would take but a feeble hold of the human mind-distracted as it is with cares, broken as it is with toils, sorrowing in recollection of yesterday, and in fear as to to-morrow if it did not find there a shadowy belief, like an almost forgotten dream, of a world where once all things were bright, gay, pure, and blessed in love. The Poet comes to us in our troubled mood, professing himself to be one who is qualified to put before us, in the vivid colors of reality, these conceptions of a felicity which we vaguely imagine, and think of as lost to humanity; and which yet, perhaps, is recoverable. We turn with distaste even with contempt or resentment - from the false professor of the noblest of arts whose creations contain no recognition, explicit or tacit, of this proper element and germ of true Poetry.