Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/63

 work, nor indeed the qualifications of the Author. What we are concerned with is—the spirit, not the body, the soul, not the form. Yet weighty inferences are derivable from the fact that religious principles were conveyed to the Hebrew people, and through these have reached other nations, in a mode that conforms itself to arbitrary rules of composition, which determine the choice of words, the structure of sentences, and the collocation of members of sentences, and the framework of entire Odes. Even in passages which breathe the soul of the loftiest and the most impassioned poetry, a highly artificial apposition and balancing of terms and clauses prevails;—as if the Form were, in the estimation of the writer, of so much importance that it should give law even to the thought itself.

This subject stands full in our path, and demands to be considered before we pass on: it is a subject that touches, not merely the Hebrew Poetry, but also the belief we should hold to concerning the Divine origination of Holy Scripture.

The conveyance of thought through the medium of language is a conditioned expression of a speaker's or a writer's inmost meaning—more or less so. In a strict sense the embodiment of thought at all, in words and combinations of words, and in sentences, is—a conditioned, as well as an imperfect conveyance of it; for words have only a more or less determinate value, which may be accepted by the hearer—especially when involved sentences