30 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
is possible for the highest secular poetry to do. How 
sweet is the opening of the song of Moses in the 32nd 
of Deuteronomy—“My doctrine shall drop as the 
rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small 
rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the 
grass : because I will publish the name of the Lord.” 
See the mournfulness of the climax in that reply to 
Hezekialds prayer against the mocker Sennacherib, who 
had ravaged Israel —“ Their inhabitants were of small 
power, they were dismayed and confounded; they were 
as the grass of the field, and as the green herb, as the 
grass on the housetops, and as corn blasted before it be 
grown up,” 2 Kings xix. 26. There are more than forty 
such comparisons of the fate of man to the grass of the 
field, and each has its own peculiar power, adaptation, 
and use, in the precious words of divine wisdom, and 
serve to bind closer the relationship of man and Nature, 
which are so distinctly set forth in the grand revelation, 
that all that is of earth shall perish, even as the grass of 
the field, “ which to day is, and to-morrow is cast into 
the oven.” If we dare not say that the grass is a 
symbol of God, we may say that in some measure its 
perennial verdure and plentifulness, and as the source 
of sustenance to myriads of creatures, represents the 
exhaustless affluence, the limitless energy, the boundless 
supervision and incessant exodus of benefits that com¬ 
bine in Him, “ by whom, and through whom, and to 
whom are all things.” It is most true, says Isaac Taylor, 
that the pious contemplatist finds in the sere herbage of 
the wilderness, and on the rugged and scorched surface of 
granite rocks, symbols enough of God; and he thinks 
