Hours of Christian Devotion. Translated from the German of A. Tholuck, D.D., Professor of Theology in the University of Halle. By Robert Menzies, D.D. Blackwood and Sons.
This excellent manual of devotional thought, the work of one of the greatest Biblical scholars that Germany has produced, has passed through many editions, and has been translated into several different languages with more or less of abridgment. Dr. Menzies has accomplished the difficult task not only of translating the prose meditations, but the numerous poetical effusions that enrich and pervade the volume. Seventy-six brief meditations on personal, experimental, and practical religion, are of course very varied in their character. Thus one of them is a running comment of extreme beauty on Psalm xxiii., followed by a poetical rendering of the spirit of the Psalm, which, even in Dr. Menzies' translation, is of a high order, as thus—
'I strayed a wild tumultuous road along,
My mind not less tumultuous than the way;'—
And a few verses later on—
'Rich is the banquet both for heart and eye,
As varying still their hues by night and day,
A world of flowers, like sparkling jewelry,
Their opening loveliness around display.
'When shines the sun aloft without a cloud,