Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/85

 been made for it in the remotest geological eras. The requirements of a land that is destined to be the home of poetry have in all instances been very peculiar:—it has sprung up and thriven on countries of very limited extent—upon areas ribbed and walled about by ranges of mountains, or girdled and cut into by seas. These—the duly prepared birth-places of poetry—have been marked by abrupt inequalities of surface—by upheavings and extrusions of the primaeval crust of the earth:—these selected lands have glistened with many rills—they have sparkled with fountains—they have been clothed with ancient forests, as well as decked, each spring anew, with flowers. Moreover a wayward climate, made so by its inequalities of surface, has broken up the wearisome monotony of the year—such as it is in tropical and in arctic regions—by irregular shiftings of the aerial aspect of all things; and there has been, in such countries, a corresponding variety in the animal and vegetable kingdoms;—there has thus been a large store in the Poet's treasury of material symbols.

A land such as this is—or was, three thousand years ago—the country in which the Hebrew Poetry had its birth, and where it reached its maturity, and where it ceased to breathe; nor has it been under conditions very different from these that Poetry has ever sprung up and flourished. It has not been a native of Tartarian steppes, nor of savannahs, or interminable prairies, nor of