i8 7 7] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 415 



the speech lack such nouns and adjectives as it requires. 

 ... It is poor in abstractions, but rich in sensuous repre 

 sentation, and has such a wealth of synonyms for the same 

 thing, because it desires always to name, and as it were to 

 paint the object in its full relation to all accompanying 

 circumstances that impress themselves on the senses. 

 The lion, the sword, the snake, the camel, have so many 

 names in Oriental (Semitic) languages because each man 

 originally depicted the thing as it appeared to himself, 

 and all these rivulets afterwards flowed into one. Even 

 in the small relics of Hebrew that we possess the profusion 

 of sensuous epithets is very notable. More than 250 

 botanical names in a collection so short and so little varied 

 in subject as is the Old Testament. How rich would the 

 language appear had we still its poetry of common life. 1 

 . . . The pronouns stand forth in bold relief, as in all 

 language of the passions. The scarcity of adjectives is so 

 supplied by combinations of other words that the attribute 

 appears as a thing, nay, even as an active being. With 

 all this, I conceive the language is as poetic as any upon 

 earth.&quot; 



of Semitic grammarians of which De Sacy was the pioneer. Our 

 abstract division of past, present, and future time has no existence in 

 the Semitic verb forms. The Semitic, but most fully the Hebrew, 

 distinguishes only perfect and imperfect action. A notion that appears 

 in the mind of the speaker as still growing is put in the imperfect, 

 whether the objective scene of its growth is the past, the present, or the 

 future. Inversely, actions conceived as complete are put in the perfect. 

 Thus, if the Hebrew wishes to say, / went and saw him, went, as the 

 completed presupposition of the seeing, stands in the perfect ; but saw, 

 which grows out of the went, is put in the imperfect, with only a slight 

 modification to show that the action is imperfect only relatively to the 

 went, not relatively to the speaker s present position. Conversely, in 

 the sentence / will go and see him, the Hebrew feels that the means grow 

 out of the end, which, in idea, is the fixed and completed pritt-s. There 

 fore / will go stands in the imperfect, but see in the perfect. Nothing 

 can show more clearly how the action and reaction of living ideas is the 

 dominating principle of the language. 



1 On this topic compare the remarks of Isaac Taylor in his Spirit of 

 Hebrew Poetry, p. 94. This ingenious treatise, though purely the work 

 of an amateur, and therefore quite deficient in scientific sharpness of 

 conception, is written in a spirit of glowing poetic sympathy, and 

 contains some good things. Taylor shows that the Old Testament 

 contains as many words about sea and water as the English language 

 can muster even when technicalities and colloquialisms are reckoned. 



2 Vol. i. pp. 15-18. 



