This charming month is like a kiss,
Given by heaven to his bride, the earth;
Telling her with a hidden blush
That a mother's joy will soon be hers.
Another word occurring at the beginning of the first chapter of Genesis that is now and again used in the Bible as a metaphor, is Ruach (רוח), meaning sometimes “wind,” and sometimes “spirit,” or divine inspiration. It is so commonly used in the latter sense that no comment is necessary here. What is, however, worth mentioning in connexion with it is that Homer also used it in the same sense, whenever he referred to the influence which his deities exercised on the human mind. There are likewise several fine Biblical metaphors modelled on Ruach (“the wind”), when it is employed either in its ordinary sense or as the emblem of punishment and calamity. So Jeremiah (iv. 11): “A dry wind blows from the high places in the wilderness toward the daughters of my people, not to fan, nor to cleanse; a powerful wind it is that shall come from those places unto me, and now I will hold judgment upon them.”
Isaiah's simile, “As the trees of the wood are moved with the wind” (Isa. vii. 2), has found a pretty parallel in Virgil's Aeneid (iv. 638), which runs thus:—
As when the winds their airy quarrel try,
Justling from every quarter of the sky;
This way and that the mountain oak they bend;
His boughs they shatter, and his branches rend;