The Sun.
London, England, 1851-02-10 00:00:00

14:VENING,

to produce in the first it), farice an alarm and awe
inconsistent with the sublime, but ultimately to
create of itself a vo!cenie stream cf nasisnal
imagination rising from the roots of the savage hill.
Sinai, hare, dark, craggy in itself, surrounded suddenly
by a mantle of gloom, and crowned above all other hills
with a diadem of fire—a fierce wind blowing in restless
eddies round it—torrents of rain descending through the
darkness—the lightnings of God playing upon the sum-
mit—thunders crashieg ineessantly—the trump which
shall call the dead to judgment sending forth a pre-
liminary note and causing the mountain to thrill and
tremble—and, heard at intervals above all, the voice of
the Eternal—the millions of 'Brael standing silent on
the plain, awe and wonder casting a shadow over their
faces—and amid all this one lonely man going up the
hill and quaking as he goes—the utterance of the fiery
law from amid the gloom—the amen of the tribes—the
seclusion of Moses with Jehovah for forty days on the
top of the Mount—the finger of god, the same finger
which dipping itself in glory had touched the firmament
and left as its trace the sun, writing the ten precepts on
the two tablets—the pissing of the Lord before Moses as
he basted and threw himself on the ground—the descent '
of the favoured man with his face shining out the tidings
whore he had been ;—all this taken together, while cal-
culatfd to cast a salutary terror down to remote ages,
and to make the children among the willows• of Canaan
to trt mble at the name of Sinai, was fitted, too, to
produce a pi culiar and terrible poetry."
Take for beauty :—" You are aware, again, in singular
union with this profound unconsciousness and simplicity (in
the Bible) of a knowledge and insight equally profound.
It is as though a child should pause amid her play and tell
you the secrets of your heart and the particulars of your
after history;" or "Galileo and young Milton in the
dungeon (surely a theme for the noblest pencil) the
meeting of Italy's old savant and England's y oung
scholar—the grey-hairs d sage, each wrinkle on his fore-
heal the furrow of a star ; and the Lady of his Col-
lege' with Comus curling in his fair locks, and the dream
of Eden sleeping on his smooth brow; while the dim
twilight of the cell, spotted by the fierce eyes of the offi-
cials, seemed the age too late or too early, oa which both
bad fallen: a meeting like that of Morning with her
one star and coming day, and Midnight with all her
melancholy maturity and hosts of diminished suns ; a
meeting like that of two centuries."

Take for grandeur:—" The poetry of the land,which is
rarely so sublime as when picturing the character and
achievements of the Desired and Expected One. This
desire—in what singular circumstances was it fulfilled.
The earth was at rest and still. The expectation of
many ages had come to its height. Ie the hush of that
universal bilence we may imagine the hearts of all
nations panting audibly with strong and intolerable
longing ;" or, "But who dare claim kindred with Eze-

kier, the severe, the mystic, the unfathomable the lonely
—whose hot hurried breath we feel approaching us like
the breath of a furnace ? Perhaps the eagle may, for
his eye was as fierce and as keen as hers. Perhaps
the lion may, for his voice too sounded vast and hollow
on the wilderness wind. Perhaps the wild ass may, for
his step was like hers, uncontrollable. Or does he not
turn away proudly from all these. and, looking up, de-
mand as associates the most fervid of the burning ones,
those who of the angelic throng stand the nearest and
yet blench the least before the throne of God? Does he
not cry as he sees the seven angels holding the seven
last vials of Divine wrath, and coming forth from the
smoke of the glory of God,' these are my brethren,'
be mine to mingle with these' to be clean as these, and
to bear a like vessel of the Lord with these? Does he
not wish to stand apart even from Isaiah, Daniel, Ha-
bakkuk, and John? The comparison of a comet, often
used and generally wasted, is strikingly applicable to
Ezekiel. Sharp, distinct yet nebulous, swift, sword-
shaped, blood-red, he hangs in the Old Testament sky
rather burning as a portent than shining as a prophet.
These passages—a few out of the many we had marked
for extract, and neither the fairest nor the lustiest of
the flock—may give a notion of that prose-poetry which
pervades this brilliant volume. Sometimes strange as the
cry of the souls under the altar, sometimes piteous as the
voice—sad up the long years—of Rachel mourning for
her children, sometimes wild as the shadowy chorus—
sorrowful as bells through rain, and swelled by
many cries out of every century—" Oh Absalom!
my son, my son I" Sweet as the accents of Ruth,
dainty as the step of Esther, plaintive as the prayer
of Hannah, and the wail of the widow of
Nain, it rises through the triumph of Miriam to
reverberations loftier and loftiest till we hear the horns
to which Jericho fell, and even the very echo of the
thunders of the Mount. So far as the poetic quality of
Gilfillan's mind is concerned we feel abundantly satisfied.
As an indicator of the presence of poetry there can be
no question of his competence; but something more is
necessary to qualify a man to come forward with a book
of such lofty pretensions as that which now lies beside
us. The critic, or expounder, or panegyrist, must not
only himself be cognisant of the poetry, but he must be
so much en rapport with his age as to be able to com-
municate his instinctive knowledge; and when taking up
such a subject as the poetry of the Bible, and speaking
of it to snob a strange, anxious, hoping, doubting, fear-
ing century as oure, all his highest faculties of insight
and tradition have work that shall task them to the
uttermost, and reward that shall overpay them though
they break under the strain. Full of his own individua-
lity, be must, nevertheless, be so fur a synopsis of his

time that every phase of it may own his k ffin.ity. It is
little that he. speak with tongues if he cannot also
interpret. Little to us that his heart is heaving if he
dies and makes no sign. Little that he is full of light
it hw cannot shine it into our darkness. Little that he is
bruised unless by his stripes we are healed. His nature
should have a point of contact for every human soul.
Breathing in the vital influence from above, he must im-
part it by imposition of hands. His eyes may be to-
wards heaven, but his feet must be firm upon the earth;
in his highest rapture we must feel that he is of us and
among us; it he is transfigured we must " be with him
in the Mount;" in his hour of (hairiest triumph he must
bear bleeding witness to his humanity ; the hand of the
unbelieving must find the side that was pierced, and his
e 3 es be satisfied with the very nailprints of crucifixion. •
In this quality of aliritual adaptiveness, on a theme
so peculiarly theological, we should not have been sur-
prised to hear George Gilfillan fail, because, aotwith-
standing his i.ften-proved literary universality, and the
many-sided charity which has fraternised with every
colour of genius ar.d every intellectual variety, there
were temptation* to sectarianism in the character of his
subject which we were not prepared to see overcome by
a clergyman "on t'other s'de Twi ed." We give
the gifted author of the " Literary Portraits" the
right hand of congratulation at the widening landscape
of his theology, and the ameliorating atmosphere of his
religious sympathies.

Not only as the heart-warm panegyrist at once of
Charming and Chalmers, Aird and dley, has he broken
down those polemical landmarks which have too often
straitened the range of Scotch and English exertion, but,
passing beyond the pale f Christianity, by virtue of
thatcountenance of unruffled fait h with which he puts aside
upon the sceptic and
the assaults of unbelief, and , f those tearful eyes of fra-
ternal appreciation which he bends
the sinner, he has made himself free of the inner mind
of the empire. Throughout the book, and especially, in
that magnificent sketch of " the Paul of the Present'
a sketch unsurpassed, perhaps, in modern literature for
strength, width, beauty, and insight—there are decla-
rations and admissions which would satisfy the sternest
advocate of ecclesiastical and religious reform, and find
the heart and meet the experience of the furthest wan-
derer from Christendom.

We have said so much of the writer, that we have
neither tune nor space for an analysis of his book. We
regret this the less,
because, in a work of this kind, the
merit of the book is involved in the merit Of the author,
and because the avowed nature and pretensions of the
performance before us put it out of the province of any-
thing but the most elaeorate criticism.
If a book comes unchristened before the world, the
critic has a fair right to class it by its diagnostics, and
try it by the recognized qualifications of the class under
which its characteristics may reasonably be subsumed.
But when a work sets out with an avowal of its objects
and sphere of action, we hold that the duty of the critic
is limited to a comparison of theory with practice, pro-
blem with solution, intention with execution. A chart
that comes to us guiltless of mensuration may honestly
be graduated as our wisdom may direct, but when the
map carries a prepared scale of miles, we cannot under-
stand the critical despotism which persists in applying
its own pocket-rule. Mr. Gilfillan relieves us of all un-
certainty as to the intentions with which his book was
panegyrist. The preface
to which it aspires. He
comeswritten,
foernwda
rtdh eavloi twe readri yy raasn ka
to his volume declares that "its main ambition is to be
a prose poem, or hymn, IN HONOUR of the poetry and the
poets of the Bible."
The structure of a prose poem—implying, we
sup-
pose, poetry exempt from the condifions of art—is so
confessedly extra-provincial, that we shall not be guilty
of the pococurantism of the critic. Of the essential poetry
of the work, the exuberant life which swells in every
line, the tumult of grandeur in which, like a sacred
pageant, it goes by us from the first chapter to the last,
we despair of conveying any adequate notion. The
author has met those grand old bards in their own
mood. He is neither commentator, annotator,
nor even, in some senses, expositor; neither die-
, sertator on dialects nor inquisitor of particles ;
' neither anatomist of hairs nor disintegrator of
atoms. Catching the prophetic gait by association he
goes through the great crowd a discerner of spirits,"
" speaking as he is moved" at the sight of the sublime,
the beautiful, and the true; content to cry Hosanna
before their first and greatest ministers, and to cast the
palm branch of human genius at the feet of those intel-
lectual giants whose lips repeated the large utterance of
Divinity—whose songs were set to the symphonies of
the thunder, and whose chorus will not cease while
creation is not dumb. Leaving to colder temperaments,
and to minds incompetent to the higher office, the
heavier literatures connected with Scripture, he has
given himself up to the one and sufficient task of declar-
ing the intuitions of his poetic instinct respecting it.
Availing himself only of so much of his critical nature
as may direct him to the beauties of his subject, retain-
ing only so much of the analyst as may
enable him to
eliminate and exhibit the Divine, he has laid aside the
philosopher for the poet, the politician for the priest, the
alchemist f m the burner of incense, the essayist for the
singer of pie zap, the censor for the optimist, the botanist
for the flower-gatherer, the sack of chaff upon the
crabbed back of Criticism for the basket of summer-fruit
in the hand of Faith and Hope ; be has exchanged the
speculative eye of the astronomer for the child's geze of
love and wonder up to heaven, and has turned gladly
from his long toil in the mines of human intellect to be
a pearl-diver and a diamond-finder on the high mountains
and in the great deeps of God.

True independence is to be found where a person
contracts his desires within the limits of his fortune.—Eliza
Cook's Journal.

The House of Lords was opened to the public, un-
der the usual regulations, on Saturday, when mere than 2,009
persoha availed themaelvea of the privilege.