430 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



Jehovah. The poet s heart is full of gratitude to God : 

 straightway sun and moon, stars and heavens, fire and 

 hail, storm, winds, mountains, beasts and creeping things, 

 must join in sounding forth His praise. 1 David celebrates 

 in Psalm xviii. the deliverances that God has wrought for 

 him in every crisis of his life. At once the earth shakes 

 and trembles, the thundering voice of Jehovah rolls across 

 the heavens, His arrowy lightnings scatter the foemen, the 

 blast of His storm-wind lays bare the channels of the seas, 

 and the Most High Himself, descending in smoke and 

 flame, stretches forth His hand and rescues His servant 

 from the waters that surge around him. Or once more, 

 when Jehovah appears to judge the earth and deliver His 

 people, the seas roar, the rivers clap hands, the mountains 

 exult together. 2 Or if His coming is viewed rather as a 

 day of terror and anguish for the guilty and rebellious, 

 then the earth reels like a drunkard, and sways like a 

 hammock, the moon is lurid and the sun pales. 3 



It must not be supposed that this imperious subjectivity 

 of the Hebrew, which demands that the whole universe 

 shall blend to the conviction that burns within the poet s 

 soul, asserts its sovereignty only in the sphere of religion. 

 No poetry can ignore the principle of sympathy between 

 the aspects of external nature and the changing views of 

 the poetic observer. But there are two ways in which 

 this principle can receive expression. The modern poet 

 is impressed with the conviction that nature has an 

 individuality, and a fixed character of her own. She is 

 capable of infinite sympathy, but her favour must be 

 wooed and won by subtle appreciation of her faintest 

 smile, by patient submission to her opposite, as well as her 

 approving moods. Of such study of nature the Semite is 

 wholly incapable. The pathos of contrast between his 

 own mental state and the expression of natural things, 

 which plays so great a part in modern poetry, has for him 

 no sweetness, or rather no existence. His eyes refuse to 



Ps. cxlviii. 2 Ibid, cxviii. 3 Isa. xxiv. 



