THE BARDS OF THE BIBLE BY GEORGE GILFILLAN. NEW-YORK: D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 200 BROADWAY. PHILADELPHIA: GEO. S. APPLETON, 164 CHESNUT-ST. 1851. Gilfillan PREFACE. THE succeeding work does not profess to be an elaborate or full account of the mechanical structure of Hebrew poetry, nor a work of minute and verbal criticism. In order that the book may be tried by its own pretensions, the author deems it necessary to premise that, while containing much literary criticism, and a considerable proportion of biographical and religious matter, and while meant to develop indirectly a subsidiary argument for the truth and divinity of the Bible, its main ambition is to be a Prose Poem, or Hymn, in honor of the Poetry and Poets of the inspired volume, although, as the reader will perceive, he has occasionally diverged into the analysis of Scripture characters, and more rarely into cognate fields of literature or of speculation. It may, perhaps, be asked why he has not conformed to the common practice of printing his poetical quotations from Scripture, as poetry, in their form of parallelism. His answer is merely, that he never could bring himself to relish the practice, or to read with pleasure those translations of the Bible where |