alone, they might at once proclaim the impotency of the factitious deities of Canaan, by the very act of showing the supremacy of Jehovah, they being contemptible in proportion as He was pre-eminent.

When the prophetic bard had declared,

My doctrine shall drop as the rain,

My speech shall distil as the dew,

in order to show why such an effect must result from what he is about to deliver, he at once. proclaims the subject of his song,—

6

Because I will publish the name of the Lord;

That is, I will tell of his infinite power, of his ineffable wisdom, of his eternal majesty. I will declare the marvellous acts of his providence in favour of Israel, his chosen. My song shall be of Him who alike governs heaven and earth, whose wisdom directs and sustains the universe; to whom the worship of his peculiar people, whom he has brought out of great tribu- ̄ lation, is so justly and so entirely due.'

The gifted bard was fairly justified in assuming the influence of his doctrine, the persuasiveness of his eloquence, and the marvellous effect of his poetry, when inspired by such a theme of imposing solemnity; and justly has he established his claim to the distinction which he here asserts.

'I am about,' he says, to make the Lord Jehovah, who delivered you and myself out of that hard bondage to which we should have probably been subjected in the land of Egypt to

the end of time, the subject of my song; and, therefore, now call upon you, in consideration of what he has done for you in the place of your captivity and in the country of the heathen

Ascribe ye greatness to Jehovah, our God.

Confess his omnipotence, his universal sovereignty, his abounding mercy, and make him the sole object of your worship.'

Here closes the exordium of this magnificent ode, though Dr. Hales considers that the introductory portion extends to the termination of the fifth verse. He observes that" this majestic vindication of the tutelar God of Israel with his chosen people consists of six parts. The first opens with an animated summons to the inhabitants of heaven and earth, to angels and men, or the whole rational creation to listen to the prophet's wholesome and refreshing discourse, contrasting the veracity and justice of God with the iniquity and ingratitude of his people. This forms the introduction to the whole poem, from the first verse to the end of the fifth."

I confess, to me it appears, that the introductory portion of this prophetic ode terminates with the fourth couplet; for in the fifth he enters upon the subject of the poem by contrasting the divine goodness with human ingratitude, which is the prominent feature of this extraordinary effusion of a most highly gifted mind.

It was the opinion of Josephus that the entire His poem was composed in hexameter verse. words are these:-" This was the form of political government which was left to us by Moses.

Moreover he had already delivered laws in writing in the fortieth year after he came out of Egypt, concerning which we will discourse in another book. But now, in the following days,for he called them to assemble continually,—he delivered blessings to them, and curses upon those who should not live according to the laws, but should transgress the duties that were determined for them to observe. After this he read to them a prophetic song, which was composed in hexameter verse, and left it to them in the holy book; it contained a prediction of what was to come to pass afterwards. Agreeably whereto all things have happened all along, and do still happen to us; and wherein he has not at all deviated from the truth."*

Although this affirmation of Josephus, so confidently made, namely, that the production of the Hebrew lawgiver to which he refers was written in hexameter verse, cannot be sustained, it is nevertheless a remarkable fact, that the third and fourth lines of the proem form together a perfect verse of this kind, as rendered in our version, as will be seen by marking the feet thus:

My-doctrine-shall-drop | as-the-rain; | my--speech shall— distilas-the-dew.

This, it is true, does not form the ordinary classic hexameter, of which the first four feet may be either dactyls or spondees; the fifth foot being generally a dactyl, and the sixth invariably a spondee, as in the following line of Horace :

* Ant. book iv. chap. 8.

Aut pro | desse volunt, aut | delec | tare po | etæ.

The hexameter produced by our translators, no further corresponds with this metrical arrangement than as it forms a verse of six feet, these feet being anapæsts and iambuses; still it is certain that a perfect rhythm is established, and that the two clauses form a regularly metrical line. Although those learned men who completed our authorized translation of the Bible were probably, in this instance, not aware of having wrought out an hexameter; that very probability will, however, give us the stronger reason to infer that they were led into this symmetrical distribution of the phrases by the artificial and euphonious construction of the original.

CHAPTER XII.

The prophetic ode continued.

I IMAGINE the poem itself to commence with the following passage, which emphatically proclaims the divine attributes:

He is the Rock, his work is perfect :
For all his ways are judgment:

A God of truth and without iniquity,
Just and right is he.

Maimonides observes,* that the word in the first hemistich of this passage translated rock, signifies fountain, origin, first cause; he therefore reads the line

He is the First Cause, his work is perfect.

The common reading, however, presents a congruous and sublime image, justly applicable to the Deity, whose truth is immutable and his attributes eternal.

"The image of a rock," says Herder,† "so frequent in this piece as almost to lose its figurative character, was undoubtedly taken from Sinai and the rocks of Arabia, among which Israel had so long wandered. On Mount Sinai the covenant was made, and on the part

* More Nevochim, chap. xvi. Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, vol. i. p. 280.