production of art approximates to the simplicity of nature. The transcendent dramatist has only been natural; the simple narrator of events has been dramatic. Both represent a bereaved parent and that parent's grief, in heart-broken, heart-breaking words. When the watchman reports the approach of Ahimaaz, and David replies, "He is a good man, and cometh with good tidings," we have one of the subtilest springs of human nature touched without design. Yet who does not know the operation of that principle which hopes or fears according to the medium by which intelligence is conveyed, and again reflects back upon that medium, the precise feeling which the intelligence has excited? Shakspeare gives a fine illustration of this, when he makes Constance say to the bearer of ill tidings— 66 'Thy news hath made thee a most ugly man." Then follows another of those delicate touches which go home and instantly to the heart. Of each succeeding messenger David asks but one question, for his soul knows but one anxiety; it concerns not the battle, though upon that his crown depended, but, "Is the young man Absalom safe?” In the history and the tragedy, the messengers alike give evasive replies in the first instance, and the sufferers are represented as guessing the truth before they hear it. David, more unkinged by grief than by his son's rebellion, rose from his place, and "went up to the chamber above the gate;" he asked no further question, desired no other intelligence, and craved no royal privilege, save the privilege to weep alone. His people were gathering roundthose who had saved and those who had injured him;-the din of battle and the shout of victory were in his ear ;-he saw and heard but heeded not-his soul was gone forth to Absalom, cut off in the full blossom of his iniquities to Absalom, his beautiful and brave—“ and the victory that day was turned into mourning." His recovered crown, his re-established throne, were vain comforters for his lost child-for him, of whom, as he went up to the chamber, he wept and said, "O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" In David we see the monarch forgotten in the father; in Macduff, after the first paroxysm of sorrow, the husband and father become merged in the warrior, who resolves to make him "medicines of his great revenge." This is characteristic, but had both been poetic imaginations, we cannot doubt which would have been considered of the highest order. One other observation on this passage. In David mourning over Absalom, one would think that pathos reached its climax; but it does not till the subsequent chapter, where his grief is rebuked by the imperious Joab; and at the suggestion (command, more properly,) of the slayer of his son, he goes again to sit in the gate," speak comfortably to his servants," and seem to forget his child. With this assumed self-control, and real submission to the will of others, remember that David was a lion-like man;" one, whom his own soldiers had pronounced "the light of Israel." 66 Lord Byron's descriptive apostrophe* to Rome, as "the Niöbe of nations,”—“ childless and crownless in her voiceless woe,""a marble wilderness," and "lone mother of dead empires,”—is in its primary idea, of a decayed kingdom personified as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit," but an eloquent paraphrase of the opening of Lamentations: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! she weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they are become her enemies." Again. I know you greatly admire the same poet's "Ode to Napoleon." Do so; but admire also Isaiah's ode on the fall of Sennacherib, the Napoleon of Babylon; and observe too, that independent of a general resemblance throughout in point of struc * Childe Harolde, canto IV, stanzas 77, 78. ture, Lord Byron's first and finest stanza is altogether derived from the prophet. "'Tis past, but yesterday a king, And armed with kings to strive, And now, thou art a nameless thing; So abject, yet alive! Is this the man of thousand thrones, Who strewed our earth with hostile bones, And can he thus survive? Since he, miscalled the morning star, "He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, is persecuted and none hindereth. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken nations! They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble; that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness?"* The chariot of Carmala in Southey's "Kehama," will remind you of Ezekiel's sublime vision of the wheels and cherubims: and the "winged hands, armless and bodiless," which * Isaiah xiv. |