Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/43

 style. Not one in the series gives evidence of his personal consciousness of the law which, nevertheless, he is silently obeying; and it is a law which is far from obvious in itself, and it is by no means such as would spontaneously offer itself, even to minds of the highest order; much less to the fervent and the inartificial. We—of this late age—trained as we are in, and familiar with, the habitudes and the phrases of abstract thought, easily recognize the principle which gives continuity to the writings of the Old Testament; and we are able to put an abstraction of this kind into words. But it is certain that no such enunciation of an occult law would have been intelligible to the writers themselves, who nevertheless, each in his turn, implicitly and always conforms himself to it. Here indeed—as throughout the material world—there is —there is an intention which gives coherence to a complicity of parts; but it is—as in the material world, so here—an intention which was unperceived and unthought of, while it was in course of execution.