George Gilfillan
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 124
Get eBook
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 edition. Excerpt: ... SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. THE POETICAL CHARACTERS m SCRIPTURE. Beside the authors and poets of the Old and New Testaments, there are, in the course of both, a number of characters depicted, teeming with peculiar and romantic interest, and who are abundantly entitled to the epithet poetical. It were unpardonable, in a book professing to include a summary of all the poetical elements of the Book of God, to omit a rapid survey of these, neither mute nor inglorious, although no songs have they sung, nor treatises of truth recorded, but who, "being dead, yet speak," in the eloquence, passion, devotion, or peculiarity and wickedness, of their histories. We are, therefore, tempted to annex the following chapter, as an appendix to the volume. First among these, stands Adam himself. How interesting the circumstances of his formation! Mark with what dignityGod accompanied the making of man. Behold the whole Trinity consulting together ere they proceeded to this last and greatest work of the Demiurgic days. God had only said--"Let there be light, let there be a firmament, let the waters be gathered together, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind;" but, when man was to be taken out of the clay, the style of Deity rises, if we may so speak, above itself, and he says--" Let us make man after our own likeness." We may imagine ourselves present at this thrilling moment. A mist is watering the face of the ground, and partially bedimming the sun. Slowly, yet mysteriously, is the red clay drawn out of the ground, fashioned, and compacted into the shape of man, till the future master of the world is, as to his bodily part, complete, and lies, statue-like and still, upon the dewey ground. But speedily, like a gentle breeze, the breath of...