the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. At this point we may pause, for we need no further demonstration of the indebtedness of English prose style to the Bible, nor would it be easy to discover a better illustration of Biblical qualities in modern guise, exemplified in a passage of more interest to all the world. South reckoned it a mark of illiteracy to be fond of high-flown metaphors and allegories, attended and set off with scraps of Greek and Latin.' If this be true, the American people in so far escape the imputation as they have set the seal of their approval on such writing as Lincoln's; and that they have had the judgment and taste to do so is due, more than to any other cause, to their familiarity with the Bible.1 1 For a parallel influence of the Bible on German cf. Nägelsbach's remarks in his Lateinische Stilistik, p. 7: "Während nun in den Schulen diese grösstentheils brotlosen Künste getrieben wurden und das Latein so sehr seine Würde verlor, dass es vor hundert Jahren in Deutschland wohl schwerlich mehr als drei geschmackvolle Stilisten gab, Mosheim, Gesner und Ernesti, hob sich auf der andern Seite die Muttersprache, an die rein gebliebene Kirchen- und Bibelsprache anknüpfend, zu einer nie geahnten Darstellungsfähigkeit." ILLUSTRATIVE COMMENTS. 1. Importance of the Bible to the Student of English. WA [RUSKIN, Præterita, Chap. 1.] ALTER SCOTT and Pope's Homer were reading of my own own selection, but my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline patient, accurate, and resolute - I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or Gibbon's, as types of language; but, once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English. [RUSKIN, Præterita, Chap. 2.] I have next with deeper gratitude to chronicle what I owed to my mother for the resolutely consistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make every word of them familiar to my ear in habitual music, yet in that familiarity reverenced, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct. xxvii This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal authority; but simply by compelling me to read the book thoroughly, for myself. As soon as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my voice, and correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if within my reach, rightly, and energetically. It might be beyond me altogether; that she did not care about; but she made sure that as soon as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end. In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis, and went straight through, to the last verse of the Apocalypse; hard names, numbers, Levitical law, and all; and began again at Genesis the next day. If a name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation, if a chapter was tiresome, the better lesson in patience, if loathsome, the better lesson in faith that there was some use in its being so outspoken. After our chapters, (from two to three a day, according to their length, the first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants allowed, none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to stay upstairs, — and none from any visitings or excursions, except real traveling,) I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the chapters thus gradually possessed from the first word to the last, I had to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound. It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my child's mind, chiefly repulsive - the 119th Psalm — has now become of all the most precious to me. ... But it is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise, — toil on both sides equal – by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn these paraphrases, and chapters, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the 'of' in the lines Shall any following spring revive I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm, (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents,) on reciting it with an accented of. It was not, I say, till after three weeks' labor, that my mother got the accent lightened on the 'of' and laid on the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, — well, there's no knowing what would have happened; but I'm very thankful she did. I have just opened my oldest (in use) Bible, a small, closely, and very neatly printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair and J. Bruce, Printers to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, in 1816. Yellow, now, with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with much use, except that the lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32d Deuteronomy, are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two chapters having cost me much pains. My mother's list of the chapters with which, thus learned, she established my soul in life, has just fallen out of it. I will take what indulgence the incurious reader can give me, for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent : And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge — in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after life, and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of all my education. [MATTHEW ARNOLD, Isaiah of Jerusalem, pp. 4−5·] I rate the value of the operation of poetry and literature upon men's minds extremely high; and from no poetry and literature, not even from our own Shakespeare and Milton, great as they are and our own as they are, have I, for my own part, received so much delight and stimulus as from Homer and Isaiah. To know, in addition to one's native literature, a great poetry and literature not of home growth, is an influence of the highest value; it very greatly widens one's range. The Bible has thus been an influence of the highest value for the nations of Christendom. And the effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred in a foreign language, as the effect of other great poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is and must be in great measure lost in a translation, because their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rime, or both; and the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make a good English poem with the matter and thoughts of Homer or Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or to reproduce their rime; but the metre and rime will be in truth his own, and the effect will be his, not the effect of Homer or Dante. Isaiah's, on the other hand, is a poetry, as is well known, of parallelism; it depends not on metre and rime, but on a balance of thought, conveyed by a correspond |