is;;] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 433 



inanimate the prayer of man goes up to God and the 

 answer of God descends on man : 



In that day, saith Jehovah, I will answer, 



I will answer the heavens, 



And they shall answer the earth ; 



And the earth shall answer the corn, and the wine, and the oil, 



And they shall answer Jezreel. 1 



From the consideration of the characteristic material 

 of feeling and fancy in which the richness of the Old 

 Testament poetry lies, we must proceed to look at the not 

 less characteristic form which the Hebrew poets impress 

 upon their thoughts. The most general law of poetic 

 form is embodied in the principle of rhythm. But while 

 all poetry is necessarily rhythmical, rhythm is of very 

 various kinds. Amidst all variety of metres, the rhythm 

 to which we Occidentals are accustomed is always more 

 or less purely syllabic. And of syllabic rhythm we are 

 familiar with two types, the rhythm of accent which pre 

 vails in our northern tongues, and the rhythm of quantity 

 (partially modified by accent) which regulates the classical 

 poetry. Neither type is unknown to the Semitic races. 

 The prosody of the Arabs is based on quantity, while in 

 Syriac, where the original distinction of long and short 

 syllables has disappeared almost as completely as in the 

 modern languages of Western Europe, each verse consists 

 of a measured number of syllables, with a rise and fall of 

 tone. But innumerable attempts to apply to the ancient 

 Hebrew poetry one or other of these analogies have 

 proved vain, and scholars are now agreed that there is no 

 syllabic rhythm in the Old Testament. But the Hebrew 

 poetry is not therefore unrhythmical. The absence of 

 metre is compensated for by a rhythm of sense. 



To understand this we must go back to the&quot; first prin 

 ciples of aesthetic expression. Alternate rise and fall of 

 energy is a fundamental law of human life, which in all its 

 forms is regulated by the necessity for repose after excite- 



1 Hos. ii. 21, 22. 



28 



