perfumes, water is brought him in ewers of gold and silver, he is invested with a purple mantle, conducted to the festive hall, and seated in a beautiful chair of ivory raised upon a step of curious workmanship. Slaves mingle wine and water in goblets, and present the gifts of Ceres in a basket; the master of the house helps him to the juicy portion of the victim, of which hel gives him five times more than to any of the others. The greatest cheerfulness prevails during the repast, and hunger is soon appeased in the midst of plenty. When they have finished eating, the stranger is requested to relate his history. At length, when he is about to depart, rich presents are made him, let his appearance at first have been ever so mean; for it is supposed that he is either a god who comes thus disguised to surprise the heart of kings, or at least an unfortunate man, and consequently a favorite of Jupiter.

Beneath the tent of Abraham the reception is different. The patriarch himself goes forth to meet his guest; he salutes bim, and then pays his adorations to God. The sons lead away the camels, and the daughters fetch them water to drink. The feet of the traveller are washed; he seats himself on the ground, and partakes in silence of the repast of hospitality. No inquiries are made concerning his history; no questions are asked him; he stays or pursues his journey as he pleases. At his departure a covenant is made with him, and a stone is erected as a memorial of the treaty. This simple altar is designed to inform future ages that two men of ancient times chanced to meet in the road of life, and that, after having behaved to one another like two brothers, they parted never to come together again, and to interpose vast regions between their graves.

Take notice that the unknown guest is a stranger with Homer and a traveller in the Bible. What different views of humanity! The Greek implies merely a political and local idea, where the Hebrew conveys a moral and universal sentiment.

In Homer, all civil transactions take place with pomp and parade. A judge seated in the midst of the public place pronounces his sentences with a loud voice. Nestor on the seashore presides at sacrifices or harangues the people. Nuptial rites are accompanied with torches, epithalamiums, and garlands suspended from the doors; an army, a whole nation, attends the

funeral of a king; an oath is taken in the name of the Furies, with dreadful imprecations.

Jacob, under a palm-tree at the entrance of his tent, administers justice to his shepherds. "Put thy hand under my thigh," said the aged Abraham to his servant, "and swear to go into Mesopotamia." Two words are sufficient to conclude a marriage by the side of a fountain. The servant conducts the bride to the son of his master, or the master's son engages to tend the flocks of his father-in-law for seven years in order to obtain his daughter. A patriarch is carried by his sons after his death to the sepulchre of his ancestors in the field of Ephron. These customs are of higher antiquity than those delineated by Homer, because they are more simple; they have also a calmness and a solemnity not to be found in the former.

3. NARRATION.

The narrative of Homer is interrupted by digressions, harangues, descriptions of vessels, garments, arms, and sceptres, by genealogies of men and things. Proper names are always surcharged with epithets. A hero seldom fails to be divine, like the immortals, or honored by the nations as a God. A princess is sure to have handsome arms; her shape always resembles the trunk of the palm-tree of Delos, and she owes her locks to the youngest of the graces.

The narrative of the Bible is rapid, without digression, without circumlocution; it is broken into short sentences, and the persons are named without flattery. These names are incessantly recurring, and the pronoun is scarcely ever used instead. of them,―a circumstance which, added to the frequent repetition of the conjunction and, indicates by this extraordinary simplicity a society much nearer to the state of nature than that sung by Homer. All the selfish passions are awakened in the characters of the Odyssey, whereas they are dormant in those of Genesis.

1 The custom of swearing by the generation of men is a natural image of the manners of that primeval age when a great portion of the earth was still a desert waste, and man was the chief and most precious object in the eyes of his fellow-man. This custom was also known among the Greeks, as we learn from the life of Crates; Diog. Laer., 1. vi.

4. DESCRIPTION.

The descriptions of Homer are prolix, whether they be of the pathetic or terrible character, melancholy or cheerful, energetic or sublime.

The Bible, in all its different species of description, gives in general but one single trait; but this trait is striking, and distinctly exhibits the object to our view.

5. COMPARISONS.

The comparisons of Homer are lengthened out by incidental circumstances; they are little pictures hung round an edifice to refresh the eye of the spectator, fatigued with the elevation of the domes, by calling his attention to natural scenery and rural

manners.

The comparisons of the Bible are generally expressed in few words; it is a lion, a torrent, a storm, a conflagration, that roars, falls, ravages, consumes. Circumstantial similes, however, are also met with; but, then, an oriental turn is adopted, and the object is personified, as pride in the cedar, &c.

6. THE SUBLIME.

Finally, the sublime in Homer commonly arises from the general combination of the parts, and arrives by degrees at its acme. In the Bible it is always unexpected; it bursts upon you like lightning, and you are left wounded by the thunderbolt before you know how you were struck by it.

In Homer, again, the sublime consists in the magnificence of the words harmonizing with the majesty of thought.

In the Bible, on the contrary, the highest sublimity often arises from a vast discordance between the majesty of the ideas and the littleness, nay, the triviality, of the word that expresses them. The soul is thus subjected to a terrible shock; for when, exalted by thought, it has soared to the loftiest regions, all on a sudden the expression, instead of supporting it, lets it fall from heaven to earth, precipitating it from the bosom of the divinity into the mire of this world. This species of sublime-the most impetuous of all—is admirably adapted to an immense and awful being, allied at once to the greatest and the most trivial objects.

CHAPTER IV.

CONTINUATION OF THE PARALLEL BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND HOMER-EXAMPLES.

A FEW examples will now complete the development of our parallel. We shall reverse the order which we before pursued,that is, we shall begin with addresses, from which short and detached passages may be quoted, in the nature of the sublime and the simile, and conclude with the simplicity and antiquity of

manners.

There is a passage remarkably sublime in the Iliad; it is that which represents Achilles, after the death of Patroclus, appearing unarmed at the entrenchments of the Greeks, and striking terror into the Trojan battalions by his shouts. The golden cloud which encircles the brows of Pelides, the flame which plays upon his head, the comparison of this flame with a fire kindled at night on the top of a besieged tower, the three shouts of Achilles which thrice throw the Trojan army into confusion, form altogether that Homeric sublime which, as we have observed, is composed of the combination of several beautiful incidents with magnificence of words.

Here is a very different species of the sublime; it is the movement of the ode in its highest enthusiasm.

....

"The burden of the valley of vision. What aileth thee also, that thou, too, art wholly gone up to the house-tops? Full of clamor, a populous city, a joyous city: thy slain are not slain by the sword, nor dead in battle. . . . . Behold, the Lord . . . will crown thee with a crown of tribulation; he will toss thee like a ball into a large and spacious country; there shalt thou die, and there shall the chariot of thy glory be, the shame of the house of thy Lord."*

Into what unknown world does the prophet all at once transport you? Who is it that speaks, and to whom are these words addressed? Movement follows upon movement, and each verse

1 Iliad, lib. xviii. 204.

2 Isaias xxii. 1, 2, 18.

produces greater astonishment than that which precedes it. The city is no longer an assemblage of edifices; it is a female, or rather a mysterious character, for the sex is not specified. This person is represented going to the house-tops to mourn; the prophet, sharing her agitation, asks in the singular, "Wherefore dost thou ascend"? and he adds wholly, in the collective: "He shall throw you like a ball into a spacious field, and to this shall the chariot of your glory be reduced." Here are combinations of words and a poetry truly extraordinary.

Homer has a thousand sublime ways of characterizing a violent death; but the Scripture has surpassed them all in this single expression :-"The first-born of death shall devour his strength." The first-born of death, to imply the most cruel death, is one of those metaphors which are to be found nowhere but in the Bible. We cannot conceive whither the human mind has been in quest of this; all the paths that lead to this species of the sublime are unexplored and unknown.1

It is thus also that the Scriptures term death the king of terrors; and thus, too, they say of the wicked man, he hath conceived sorrow, and brought forth iniquity.3

When the same Job would excite a high idea of the greatness of God, he exclaims :-Hell is naked before him, he withholdeth the waters in the clouds,5-he taketh the scarf from kings, and girdeth their loins with a cord.

The soothsayer Theoclimenus is struck, while partaking of the banquet of Penelope, with the sinister omens by which the suitors are threatened. He addresses them in this apostrophe :

O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade:

With tears your wan, distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:

Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,

To people Orcus and the burning coasts!

Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole.7

1 Job xviii. 13. We have followed here the Hebrew text, with the polyglott of Ximenes, the versions of Sanetes Pagnin, Arius Montanus, &c. The Vulgate has, "first-born death," primogenita mors.

2 Ibid. v. 14.

5 Ibid. xii. 15.

3 Ibid. xv. 35.

7 'Pope's Homer's Odyss., book xx. 423-430.

4 Ibid. xxvi. 6.

6 Ibid. xii. 18.