Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/141

Rh of ideas, so utterly unknown to Shemitic nations, whose organizations have always been of distressing and fatal simplicity.

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 lambent 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 delicate, all that are profound, are our own work. The subject which is essentially