ble "a lamb for a burnt-offering," the simplest of stories, producing the most tremendous of heart-quakes. No four words in any language are simpler, and none stronger, than the words, "Thou art the Man." What effect one quiet sentence can produce! The whispers of the gods, how strong and thrilling Nathan, that gentle prophet, becomes surrounded with the grandeur of an apparition, and his words fall like the slow, heavy drops of a thunder-shower. The princely, gallant king quails before him; and how can you recognize the author of the 18th Psalm, with its fervid and resistless rush of words and images, like coals of fire, in that poor prostrate worm, grovelling on the ground, and afraid of the eyes of his own servants?

The genius of David remains for the analysis of the next chapter. But we must not omit the darkest and most poetic hour in all his history, when he cast himself into the hands of God rather than of men; and, when under the fiery sword and the menacing angel, we can conceive admiration for the magnificence of the spectacle, contending with terror-his cheek pale, but his eye burning-the king in panic-the poet in transport, and grasping instinctively for a harp he had not to express his high-strung emotions. Lightning pausing ere it strikes the poison of Pestilence, hung over the "highviced city" in the sick air-Death, in the fine fiction of Le Sage, coming up to the morning Madrid-must yield to this figure leaning over the devoted city of God, while both earth and heaven seem waiting to hear the blow which shall break a silence too painful and profound.

Besides Solomon's Proverbs and Poems, there are in his life certain incidents instinct with imagination. The choice of Hercules is a fine apologue, but has not the sublimity or the completeness of the choice of Solomon.

Then there are the sublime circumstances of the dedication of the temple; the pomp of the procession by which. the ark was brought up from the city of David to the prouder resting-place his son had prepared; the assemblage of all Israel to witness the solemnity; the sacrifice of innumerable sheep and oxen covering the temple and dimming the day with a cloud of fragrance; the slow march of the priests, through the courts and up the stairs of the glorious fabric, till the SANCTUARY was reached; the music which attended the march, peopling every corner and crevice of the building

with voluminous and searching swell; the moment when the sudden ceasing of the music, in mid-volume, told the people without that the ark was now resting in its "own place;" the louder strain, of cymbals, psalteries, harps, and trumpets, which awoke when the priests returned from the most holy place; the slow coming down, as if in answer to the signal of the music, of the cloud of the glory of God-a cloud of dusky splendor, at once brighter than day and darker than midnight—the very cloud of Sinai, but without its thunders or lightnings; the music quaking into silence, and the priests throwing themselves on the ground, before the "darkness visible" which fills the whole house, lowering over the foreheads of the bulls of brass, and blackening the waves of the molten sea; and the august instant when Solomon, trembling yet elate, mounts the brazen scaffold, and standing dimdiscovered amidst a mist of glory, spreads out his hands, and in the audience of the people, utters that prayer so worthy of the scene, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven, and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house that I have builded!" Surely Solomon here, next to Moses on Sinai, had reached the loftiest point ever permitted to mortal man.

But time would fail us even to glance at the numerous remaining poetical incidents, circumstances, and passages in the historical books. We must omit, reluctantly, the visit of the Empress of Sheba to Sultan Solomon--Micaiah's vision of Ramoth-Gilead, and of what was to befall Israel and its king there the destruction of Sennacherib and his army, in one night, by the angel of the Lord-the great passover of Josiah and, besides several incidents, already alluded to as occurring in Ezra and Nehemiah, the history of Esther-a history so simple, so full of touches of nature and glimpses into character, so divine, without any mention of the name of God. The most impassioned lover is the secret, who never names his mistress. The ocean is not less a worshipper that she mutters not her Maker's name. The sun is mute in his courts of praise. In Esther, God dwells, as the heart in the human frame-not visible, hardly heard, and yet thrilling and burning in every artery and vein. No label proclaims his presence, but the life of the book has been all derived from Him.

CHAPTER VII.

POETRY OF THE BOOK OF PSALMS.

WE have, in the previous chapter, rather outshot the period of the Psalms; but we must throw out a line, and take up David, ere we sail further.

No character has suffered more than that of David, from all sorts of imperfect appreciation. While some have treated him as a monster of cruelty and lust, classing him with the Neros and Domitians, others have invested him with almost divine immunities, as if we had no more right to ask at him than at God, "What dost thou ?"-as if his motives had been irreproachable as those of the wind, and his vengeance inevitable as the thunderbolt. David, in our view of him, was neither a monster nor a deity-neither a bad man nor by any means the highest of Scripture worthies. William Hazlitt has nowhere more disgraced his talents, amid his many offences, than in a wretched paper in the "Round Table," where he describes David as a crowned spiritual hypocrite, passing from debasing sins to debasing services-debauching Bathsheba, murdering Uriah, and then going to the top of his palace, and singing out his penitence in strains of hollow melody. Paine himself, even in his last putrid state, never uttered a coarser calumny than this. Nor ever did the pure and lofty spirit of Edward Irving look nobler, and speak in higher tones, than when, in his preface to "Horne on the Psalms," he gave a mild, yet stern verdict upon the character of this royal bard-a verdict in which judgment and mercy are both found, but with "mercy rejoicing against judgment." Many years have elapsed since we read that paper, and, should our views, now to be given, happen, as we hope, to be found to coincide with it, we must still claim them as our own. We remember little more than its tone and spirit.

David was a composite, though not a chaotic, formation. At first, we find him as simple and noble a child of God, nature, and genius, as ever breathed. A shepherd boy, watching now the lambs, and now the stars, his sleep is peradventure haunted by dreams of high enterprise and coming

glory, but his days are calm and peaceful as those of the boy in the Valley of Humiliation, who carried the herb "heart's ease" in his bosom, and sang (next to David's own 23d Psalm) the sweetest of all pastorals, closing with the lines

"Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age."

And yet this boy had done, even ere he went to the camp of Israel, one deed of "derring-do;" he had wet his hands in the blood of a lion and bear. This had given him a modest sense of his own strength, and perhaps begun to circulate a secret thrill of ambition throughout his veins; and when he obeyed the command of Jesse to repair to his brethren in the host, it might be with a foreboding of triumph, and a smelling of the battle afar off. We can conceive few subjects fitter for picture or poetry, than that of the young David measuring the mass of steel-Goliath—with an eye which mingled in its ray, wonder, eagerness, anger,

and

"That stern joy which warriors feel

In foemen worthy of their steel."

A hundred battles looked forth in that lingering, longing, insatiate glance. Every one knows the result to the giant of Gath he fell before the smooth sling-stone. The result on David's mind is not quite so evident; but we think that all the praises and promotion he received, did not materially affect the simplicity of his habits, or the integrity of his purposes. Nor did, at first, the persecution of Saul much exasperate his spirit, balanced as that was by the love of Jonathan. But his long-continued flight and exile-the insecurity of his life, the converse he had with "wild men and wild usages in the cave of Adullam and the wilderness of Ziph—although they failed in weaning him from his God, or his Jonathan, or even Saul-did not fail somewhat to embitter his generous nature, and to render him less fitted for bearing the prosperity which suddenly broke upon him. MORE men are prepared for sudden death than for sudden success. after he had reached the throne of his father-in-law, there remained long obscure contests with the remnant of Saul's party, sudden inroads from the Philistines, and a sullen dead resistance on the part of the old heathen inhabitants of the

Even

land, to annoy his spirit. And when afterwards he had brought up the ark of the Lord to the city of David-when the Philistines were bridled, the Syrians smitten, the Ammonites chastised, and their city on the point of being taken -from this very pride of place David fell-fell foully-but fell not for ever. From that hour, his life ran on in a current of disaster checkered with splendid successes: it was a tract of irregular and ragged glory, tempering at last into a troubled yet beautiful sunset. But all the elements for our judgment of it had been collected by the time that the "matter of Uriah" was fully transacted.

A noble nature, stung before its sin, aad seared before its time, contending between the whirlpool of passion and the strong still impulses of poetry and faith, ruling all spirits except his own, and yet for ever seeking to regulate it, too, sincere in all things-in sin and in repentance-but sincerest in repentance—often neglecting the special precept, but ever loving the general tenor of the law, unreconciled to his age or circumstances, and yet always striving after such a reconciliation, harassed by early grief, great temptations, terrible trials in advanced life, and views necessarily dim and imperfect-David, nevertheless, retained to the last his heart, his intellect, his simplicity, his devotion-above all, his sincerity -loved his God, saw from afar off his Redeemer; and let the man who is "without sin," among his detractors, cast the first stone. His character is checkered, but the stripes outnumber the stains, and the streaks of light outnumber both. In his life, there is no lurking-place-all is plain: the heights are mountains-"the hills of holiness," where a free spirit walks abroad in singing robes; the valleys are depths, out of which you hear the voice of a prostrate penitent pleading for mercy, but nothing is, or can be, concealed, since it is God's face which shows both the lights and shadows of the scene. David, if not the greatest or best of inspired men, was certainly one of the most extraordinary. You must try him not, indeed, by divine or angelic comparison; but if there be any allowance for the aberrations of a tortured, childlike, devout son of genius-if the nobler beasts of the wilderness themselves will obey a law, and observe a chronology, and follow a path of their own, then let the wanderer of Adullam be permitted to enter, or to leave his cave at his own time, and in his own way, seeing that his wanderings