Though Sion’s echoes with our grief resound;
The mighty victors fall’n and vanquished lie,
And war’s refulgent weapons strew the ground.”
Didactic Poetry.—In the golden age, didactic poetry also reached the acme of perfection. The Proverbs that then flowed from the inspired pen of Solomon, prince of didactic writers as his father was of lyric poets, are too well known, with all their richness of practical wisdom, to require more than a passing mention. Expressed concisely in energetic words, according to the different forms of parallelism, these moral precepts are indeed “like apples of gold in baskets of silver.”
Of the same general scope as the Proverbs, and by the same author, is Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. In this book is shown the vanity of earthly pleasures; and the whole duty of man is summed up in the sentence, “Fear God and keep his commandments.” The Book of Ecclesiastes has been attributed to Solomon’s latter days; the Proverbs, to his prime; while that sweet pastoral, the Song of Songs—singularly beautiful, whether taken literally as an exponent of happy wedded love, or allegorically as delineating the mutual attachment of God and his people—was the joyous outburst of his youth. Solomon was also the author of a thousand canticles and various works on miscellaneous subjects; books of making which, he tells us, there was no end.
Prophetic Poetry of the Golden Age.—The writings of the earlier prophets, florid with high-wrought imagery, revived for a time the waning glories of the golden age. Foremost of this class in eloquence of diction, sublimity of thought, and versatility of genius, stands Isaiah. Majesty united with elaborate finish; a harmony that delights the soul; a variety that imparts freshness without detracting from dignity; simplicity and unvarying purity of language,—conspire to make the lyric verse of “the Evangelical Prophet” the most appropriate embodiment of the awful messages of God to the Jews, the promise of a Messiah and universal peace.
After a career of nearly seventy years, Isaiah sealed his great work with his blood in the reign of the idolatrous Manasseh (698-643 B.C.). His mind has been pronounced “one of the most sublime and variously gifted instruments which the Spirit of God has ever employed to pour forth its Voice upon the world.”
Even the minor prophets, if we except Jonah the oldest, exhibit in their compositions unwonted grandeur and elegance: Hosea, with his sententious style; Amos, “the herdman and gatherer of sycamore fruit;” Joel and Micah; Habakkuk, whose fervent prayer to the Almighty is graced with the loftiest embellishments, and Nahum, perhaps the boldest and most ardent of all.
And so the Golden Age of Hebrew Literature ends. We know only its sacred poetry, and much indeed of this has disappeared.[11] The harvest and vintage songs which wakened the echoes amid the vales of Palestine, the pastorals that accompanied the shepherd’s pipe on the hill-sides of Ephraim, all are lost forever; “the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the bride,” were forgotten in the streets of Jerusalem, when the land was desolate under the Babylonian and “the daughters of music were brought low.”