in is a pledge that the empire of evil shall not invade the lot of the righteous. Moreover, these companies of pilgrims were family parties, as an incident of the New Testament reminds us: hence the hundred and twenty-seventh psalm (cited elsewhere 1), contrasting the life of busy care with the peaceful family life, or the next, which associates family joys with the blessing out of Zion, or the hundred and thirty-first, which draws from child life a conception of personal and national humble-mindedness, or again the hundred and thirty-third, which celebrates the unity of brethren. The two poems of the collection that have yet to be mentioned connect themselves directly with the Temple: one (the hundred and thirty-second) is the Dedication hymn of David and Solomon, and the other makes an appropriate close to the collection in the form of a brief exchange of greetings between the retiring worshippers and the Night Watch remaining on guard. The psalms, individually considered, then, suggest a twofold origin; the combination of both types in a common collection is not difficult to understand. Either the 'Songs of the goings up' was at first the title for poems of the Captivity and Return, and this little psalter came to be increased by the songs of pilgrimages to the second Temple; or, more probably, the old traditionary Pilgrim Songs made the first collection, and its contents were doubled by that great pilgrimage beside which all others were commonplace. In any case the 'Songs of Ascents' are a series of hymns impressing every reader with their strong resemblance to one another; and they are the quintessence of all that is most attractive, and most unanalysable, in sacred lyrics. The Elegy We pass to a new division of Lyric Poetry in the Elegy. I have already remarked how the elegy rests upon the professional mourning; and how it has a rhythm of its own. There is a curious parallelism between the Hebrew rhythm of elegy and that of Greek and Latin poetry. The latter is composed of the ordinary hexameter followed by the shorter pentameter. 1 Above, page 101. In Hebrew the elegiac rhythm is the ordinary couplet with the second member weakened, by being either shortElegiac rhythm ened or left destitute of antithesis or parallelism, so much so that the two are usually printed as a single line with a cæsura. He hath fenced me about that I cannot go forth; he hath made my chain heavy. The difference of this from the ordinary rhythm is well seen in the transition from one to the other already cited as an effect in the English version of Deborah's Song. Lamentations of In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, The highways were unoccupied, And the travellers walked through byways; The rulers ceased in Israel, They ceased Until that I, Deborah, arose, That I arose a mother in Israel. They chose new gods; Then was war in the gates: Was there a shield or spear seen Among forty thousand in Israel ? But the widespread use of this elegiac rhythm in Biblical literature is lost to the English reader, since none of the accepted versions keep it up in their translation.' The loss is greatest in the elaborate elegy entitled the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is a highly artificial composition built up on the principle of elegiac rhythm and a curious alphabetical succession of verses. The great blot upon the Revised Version of our Bible is the absence of any attempt to represent the acrostic structure which affects these as so many other Hebrew poems. The pathos of individual passages in the Lam 1 For a systematic treatment of the whole subject, see an article by Karl Budde in the New Review, March, 1893. entations is obvious enough; but the literary form of the whole as it stands in our English Versions is impossible of appreciation.1 Psalm lxxiv Psalm 1xxx There are elegies amongst the most familiar poems of the psalter. One is the song of the captives weeping by the rivers of Babylon, hanging their harps upon the willows at the thought of singing the songs of Zion in a strange land; Psalm cxxxvii until the wail hardens into an ecstasy of hatred as they long for one who will take the little ones of the oppressor and dash them against the ground. Another tells the evil done to the sanctuary by the enemy, how they behaved as men that lifted up axes upon a thicket of trees, how the carved work is broken down with hatchet and hammers, and fire has converted the sacred pile into a profane ruin. Another is made distinctive by the sustained image of the Vine brought out of Egypt, with nations cast out to make room for it; it had taken deep root until mountains were covered by its shadow and its branches reached to the River and the Sea; but now its fences are thrown down, and the beasts out of the wood can ravage it, nay, it is cut down and burned with fire. And no Biblical elegy is more impressive than the earliest of them all, the lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan, preserved by its connection with archery meetings founded in honour of Jonathan. The simple pathos of this song is familiar to all. It is worth while also to note the structural beauty of the augmenting refrain at the opening of the elegy it is, How are the mighty fallen; when the stanzas special to Saul are completed it has become, How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle; at the end of the final section expressing the poet's tender love for Jonathan the refrain has grown to a full couplet : II Samuel i. 1 In The Psalms by Four Friends, or the abridged edition of it as the Psalter in the Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan & Co.), the acrostic effect is maintained throughout; and the Book of Lamentations is given in full (in the second edition of the larger work). In the second volume of Psalms (Modern Reader's Bible) I have more fully discussed this remarkable elegiac masterpiece, Lyric Meditations Psalm cxix How are the mighty fallen, And the weapons of war perished! Songs celebrate a theme: Meditations reflect upon it. The distinction may seem slight, yet it covers a difference of lyric spirit that needs to be represented in a literary classification. Under this head of Meditations will come, not only the poem which introduces the whole psalter, but also that tour-de-force of meditative ingenuity, the hundred and nineteenth psalm. It is made up of no less than a hundred and seventy-six sayings disposed on an acrostic arrangement, and bound together by the common feature that each verse contains some synonym for that which is the topic of the whole - the LAW OF THE LORD. I have in previous chapters referred to the eighth psalm as a meditation on Man as the Viceroy of God, to the nineteenth, which has for its topic the Heavens above and the Law within; and to the thirty-sixth, with its contrast of Evil Unbounded and Infinite Good. Amongst the most popular of all Scriptural poems are the meditations on the Consecrated Life, the Quiet Soul, the Protection of Jehovah. A pair of companion poems seem clearly to be founded on a couplet Psalms xc, xci from the Blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy: the ninetieth psalm breathes throughout the spirit of the line Psalms xv, cxxxi, xxiii The Eternal God is thy dwelling place while the psalm that follows is no less clearly an expansion of the thought Underneath are the everlasting arms. This may explain how tradition has come to affix to the first of the two the title, A Prayer of Moses the Man of God. Lastly, we may note how that which is a leading difficulty of wisdom literature is also the subject of three elaborate lyric meditations. The Prosperity of the Wicked is, in the thirty-seventh psalm, treated in a collection Psalms xxxvii, xlix, lxxiii of gnomic sayings, acrostically arranged. The same topic, in the forty-ninth psalm, appears as a 'parable' or 'dark saying,' which with strophic structure and varying refrain dwells upon the vanity of worldly splendour in the light of inevitable death. In the seventy-third psalm the mystery of prosperous wickedness causes the singer to all but lose his faith: he recovers it only when he goes into the sanctuary of God. It may be permissible at this point to digress from the classification of lyrics, which is the subject of these two chapters, in order briefly to discuss modes by which lyric thought is developed. Notable modes of lyric movement have already been reviewed in connection with the odes. The simpler poems resemble in their development the poetry of modern times: but a few special features may be mentioned. It Imagery belongs to all kinds of lyric poetry alike. One remark may be made as to the use of it by the poets of the psalter. is characteristic of them to crowd their images Imagery as a together in rapid succession; and such quick play mode of lyric deof imagery sometimes is made to interchange with velopment the development of a single image in full detail. I will give two illustrations of such interchange. In the opening verses of the twenty-seventh psalm the images are so crowded together that there is danger of our losing them through their very exuberance. When all the sug- Psalm xxvii. 1-6 gestions lurking in word and phrase are pressed, the whole passage seems to call up visions of danger chasing one another as through the changes of a dream. The poet is desperately threading his way through pitchy blackness, with pitfalls all around him - when a sudden light shines, and all is clear: the LORD is that light. He is back again in the thick of his perils, he has actually stumbled - when he is suddenly caught up and supported in that salvation he sees the LORD. Now he is being chased by the foe, and they are gaining upon him-when a stronghold unseen before opens its gates to him and he is safe: |