Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/323

Rh save trust in the oracles through which a just and merciful Protector, a pervading Spirit, a living Mediator and Consoler, had been revealed. This being its nature, and as the crowning masterpiece of faith, you find that in various and constructive beauty—as a work of poetic art—it is unparalleled. It is lyrical from first to last with perfect and Its symphonic perfection. melodious forms of human speech. Its chants and anthems, its songs of praise and hope and sorrow, have allied to themselves impressive music from the originative and immemorial past, and the enthralling strains of its inheritors. Its prayers are not only for all sorts and conditions of men, but for every stress of life which mankind must feel in common—in the household, or isolated, or in tribal and national effort, and in calamity and repentance and thanksgiving. Its wisdom is forever old and perpetually new; its calendar celebrates all seasons of the rolling year; its narrative is of the simplest, the most pathetic, the most rapturous, and most ennobling life the world has known. There is no malefactor so wretched, no just man so perfect, as not to find his hope, his consolation, his lesson, in this poem of poems. I have called it lyrical; it is dramatic in structure and effect; it is an epic of the age of faith; but in fact, as a piece of Without a parallel. inclusive literature, it has no counterpart, and can have no successor. Time and again some organization for worship and instruction, building its foundations upon reason rather than on faith, has