My heart shall rejoice, even mine;
Yea, my reins shall rejoice
When thy lips speak right things.
It may be objected to Hebrew poetry, says Gilfillan, that it has no regular rhythm except a rude parallelism. What then? Must it be, therefore, altogether destitute of music? Has not the rain a rhythm of its own, as it patters on the pane, or sinks on the bosom of its kindred pool? Has not the wind a harmony, as it bows the groaning woods, or howls over the mansions of the dead? Have not the waves of ocean their wild bass? Has not the thunder its own deep and dreadful organ-pipe? Do they speak in rhyme? Do they murmur in blank verse? Who taught them to begin in Iambics, or to close in Alexandrines? And shall not God’s own speech have a peculiar note, no more barbarous than is the voice of the old woods or the older cataracts?
Besides, to call parallelism a coarse or uncouth rhythm, betrays an ignorance of its nature. Without entering at large on the subject of Hebrew versification, we may ask any one who has paid even a slight attention to the subject, if the effect of parallels such as the foregoing examples, perpetually intermingled as they are, be not to enliven the composition, often to give distinctness and precision to the train of thought, to impress the sentiments upon the memory, and to give out a harmony which, if inferior to rhyme in the compression produced by the difficulty (surmounted) of uniting varied sense with recurring sound, and in the pleasure of surprise; and to blank verse, in freedom, in the effects produced by the variety of pause, and in the force of long and linked passages, as well as of insulated lines, is less slavish than the one, and less arbitrary than the other? Unlike rhyme, its point is more that of thought than of language; unlike blank verse, it never can, however managed, degenerate into heavy prose. Such is parallelism, which generally forms the differential quality of the poetry of Scripture, although there are many passages in it destitute of this aid, and which yet, in the spirit they breathe, and the metaphors by which they are garnished, are genuine and high poetry. And there can be little question that in the parallelism of the Hebrew tongue we can trace many of the peculiarities of modern writing, and in it find the fountain of the rhythm, the pomp and antithesis, which lend often such grace, and always such energy, to the style of Johnson, of Junius, of Burke, of Hall, of Chalmers,—indeed, of most writers who rise to the grand swells of prose-poetry.
SIMILARITY OF SOUND.
There is a remarkable similarity of sound in a passage in the Second Book of Kings, ch. iii. v. 4, to the metrical rhythm of Campbell’s Battle of the Baltic:—
A hundred thousand lambs,
And a hundred thousand rams,
With the wool.