Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/113

 life? There is evidence that it was so: there is evidence in contradiction of modern nugatory assertions concerning "the rude and barbarous horde." A people is not rude that notes all diversities in the visible world; nor is it barbarous if its language abounds in phrases that are the need of the social, the domestic, and the benign emotions.

Proof conclusive to this effect is contained, by necessary implication, in the fact that the Hebrew people were addressed ordinarily by their Teachers in a mode which (as to its structure) is subjected to the difficult conditions of elaborate metrical rules, and in the style of that fervid and figurative phraseology which is evidence of the existence among the people of an imaginative consciousness, and of an emotional sensibility, far more acute than that of the contemporary nations of whom we have any knowledge. The Prophets and Poets of this people use the material imagery—the bold metonyms, the transmuted phrases—of the imaginative and emotional style with an ease and a naturalness which indicates the existence of corresponding intellectual habitudes in the popular mind. As was the Prophet, such, no doubt, were the Prophet's hearers—obdurate and gainsaying often; nevertheless they were accessible always to those modes of address which are intelligible, even to the most obdurate, when they have belonged to the discipline and economy of every man's earliest years. Every man's better recollections were of a kind that put