Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/44

Rh extends the network of the rhythmical period, by combining the two and three line strophe with ascending and descending rhythm into greater strophic wholes rounded off into themselves, the alphabetical Ps 37 furnishes us with a safe answer to the question, for this is almost entirely tetrastichic, e.g., About evil-doers fret not thyself, About the workers of iniquity be thou not envious. For as grass they shall soon be cut down, And as the green herb they shall wither, but it admits of the compass of the strophe increasing even to the pentastich, (Psa 37:25, Psa 37:26) since the unmistakeable landmarks of the order, the letters, allow a freer movement: Now I, who once was young, am become old, Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken And his seed begging bread. He ever giveth and lendeth And his seed is blessed. From this point the sure guidance of the alphabetical Psalms fails us in investigating the Hebrew strophe-system. But in our further confirmatory investigations we will take with us from these Psalms, the important conclusion that the verse bounded by Sôph pasûk, the placing of which harmonizes with the accentuation first mentioned in the post-Talmudic tractate Sofrim, is by no means (as, since Köster, 1831, it has been almost universally supposed) the original form of the strophe but that strophes are a whole consisting of an equal or symmetrical number of stichs. Hupfeld (Ps. iv.