The heavens declare. — Better, the heavens are telling. The poet is even now gazing at the sky, not philosophising on a familiar natural phenomenon, nor is he merely enjoying beauty. Not only is his æsthetic faculty satisfied, but his spirit, his religious nature is moved. He has an immediate apprehension, an intuition of God. He is looking on the freshness of the morning, and all he sees is telling of God, bringing God before him. This constitutes the essence of the greater part of Hebrew poetry. This is the inspiration of the bard of Israel — a religious inspiration. The lower, the aesthetic perception of beauty, is ready at every moment to pass into the higher, the religious emotion. All truly great poetry partakes of this elevation — Hebrew poetry in its highest degree. Some lines from Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sunrise in the Yale of Chamouni not only supplies a modern example, but explains the moral, or rather spiritual process, involved —
“O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Did’st vanish from my thought; entranced in prayer,
I worshipped the Invisible alone.”
(See an article on “God in Nature and in History,” in The Expositor for March, 1881.)