i8 7 7] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 423 



king of Babel who so mercilessly hewed down their 

 glory. 1 



No relation of man to nature has a stronger fascination 

 for the Semitic mind than that of practical lordship over 

 powers so much mightier than his own. Every one knows 

 how this fascination finds its expression in the wondrous 

 Oriental tales of enslaved genii and the like. The same 

 thing is to be seen in the magic of Eastern nations. 

 An Arab servant accompanying a European naturalist, 

 would regard his master as a madman, were he not per 

 suaded that his scientific collections are to be used in some 

 mysterious way to enthral the powers of creation. This 

 tendency finds a loftier and truer, but not less character 

 istic, expression in the Old Testament. If the Israelite 

 abjured magic arts, it was not because he was indifferent 

 to the world-sovereignty of man, but because he knew 

 that that sovereignty is more surely rooted in the creation 

 gift of God, which is so nobly sung in the eighth Psalm. 



1 Isa. xiv. 8. &quot; Living water &quot; is the standing name in the Old 

 Testament for spring water. The personification of trees is constant, 

 and it is remarkable that, while the animal fable of Aesop is not, as has 

 sometimes been wrongly imagined, a Semitic product, we find in the 

 Old Testament two parables of trees (Jud. ix. 8 seq. ; 2 Kings xiv. 9). 

 The nearest Western analogon to this play of fancy is to be found in 

 certain features of the Teutonic Mdrchen, which have been well 

 explained by Heine, whose Jewish birth gave him a hereditary right to 

 understand and delight in this subjective vein of imagination. See a 

 passage in the Harzreise, where he describes an aged trembling grand 

 mother who has sat for a quarter of a century behind the stove opposite 

 the cupboard, till her thoughts and feelings have grown into union with 

 all the corners of the stove and all the carvings on the cupboard. &quot; And 

 cupboard and stove live, for a human being has breathed into them 

 a portion of her life.&quot; Heine proceeds to explain how, to thoughtful, 

 quiet folk, living a life of deep &quot; immediate &quot; contemplation, the inner 

 life of inanimate objects revealed itself, and these acquired a necessary 

 consistent character, a sweet mixture of fanciful whimsicality and true 

 human dispositions. Amidst all difference of detail between the 

 imagination that shaped the Mdrchen, and that which dominates 

 Hebrew poetry, the great point of agreement is what Heine rightly calls 

 the &quot; immediacy,&quot; Unmittelbarkeit, of both the way in which the 

 Teuton or the Semite stands in direct contact and personal fellowship 

 with the life of the objects that surround him. Something of the same 

 feeling pervades the works of a great Jewish painter, Josef Israels. 



