SHEMITIC CIVILIZATION. 125 



plexity of ideas, so utterly unknown to 

 Shemitic nations, whose organizations have 

 always been of distressing and fatal sim- 

 plicity. 



In Art and Poetry, what do we owe to 

 them ? Nothing in Art. These nations 

 have but little of Art in them ; our Art 

 comes entirely from Greece. In Poetry, 

 however, without being their dependents, 

 we hold in common with them more than 

 one point of resemblance. The Psalms have 

 become, in some respects, one of our sources 

 of poetry. Hebrew poetry has taken its 

 place among us, by the side of Greek 

 poetry, not as furnishing any positive school, 

 but as constituting a poetical ideality, a sort 

 of Olympus, where, by dint of an accepted 

 prestige, everything is tinted by a lam- 

 bent glory. Milton, Lamartine, Lamennais, 

 would not have existed at all, or certainly 

 not as they are, without the Psalms. 

 Here, again, all the shadows that are deli- 

 cate, all that are profound, are our own 

 work. The subject which is essentially 



