And God made final answer: "Nor from thee
To add to him. But know thou this one day
Spent by thee in the study of My law
Shall find more favor in My sight than steam
And savor of burnt-offerings thousandfold
That Solomon, thy son, shall sacrifice."

And the Lord ceased; and David held his peace;
But ever after, when the Sabbath dawned,
Till sunset followed sunrise, sate the king-
The volume of the Book upon his knees—
Absorbed in meditation and in prayer,

So to be found what time his hour should come;
And many a week the Sabbath came and went.
About the rearward of the palace grew

An orchard trimly planted,-to the sense
Pleasant with sight and smell and grateful shade
In summer noons, and, beyond this again,
Such lodging as the king should give the steeds
That draw his royal chariot, and the hounds
That, for his pastime, in the forest rouse
The lion from his lair. And lo! it chanced
One Sabbath morn, the slave whose office 'twas
To tend King David's kennels, in his task
Had made default, and left the unfed hounds
Howling for hunger. So their cry disturbed
The king, who knew it not. And David rose,
And put aside the volume, and in haste
Passed through the postern to the orchard plot,
Seeking the uproar's cause. And as his foot
O'erstepped the threshold, there he fell down-dead!

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147

Then straightway in hot haste the news was brought To Solomon, who all the Rabbis called

To sudden council. "Tell me," said the king,

Ye sages of the law; my father lies

Dead in his orchard, and the Sabbath yet
Lacks many hours of ending; were it well
To raise and bear the body now at once
To the corpse-chamber, or to let it lie
There until set of sun? And lo! his hounds
Howl for their food; may I cut meat for them
Upon the Sabbath-day?" And with one voice
The Rabbis answered: "Let the Sabbath close
Ere thou lift up the king thy father's corpse;
But thou may'st carve their portion for the hounds."

So until sunset, in the orchard lay The king untended; but the hounds were fed;

And Solomon said only, "Yea! a dog

Alive is worthier than a lion dead!"

ANONYMOUS

55

DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL

There never was a specimen of manhood so rich and ennobled as David, the son of Jesse, whom others haply may have equalled in single features of his character; but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush of generous, Godlike excellencies, hath never yet been seen embodied in a

single man. His Psalms, to speak as a man, do place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the Old Testament, equalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel; but in love of country, and glorying in its heavenly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of Providence, such delineations of deep affliction and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion in the worship of the living God! such invocations to all nature, animate and inanimate, such summonings of the hidden power of harmony and of the breathing instruments of melody! Single hymns of this poet would have conferred immortality upon any mortal, and borne down his name as one of the most favored of the sons of men.

But it is not the writings of the man which strike us with such wonder, as the actions and events of his wonderful history. He was a hero without a peer, bold in battle and generous in victory; never overcome by distress or by triumph. Though hunted like a wild beast among the mountains, and forsaken like a pelican in the wilderness by the country whose army he had delivered from disgrace, and by the monarch whose daughter he had won, whose son he had bound to him with cords of brotherly love, and whose own soul he was wont to charm with the sacredness of his minstrelsy, he

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never indulged malice or revenge against his unnatural enemies. Twice, at the peril of his life, he brought his blood-hunter within his power, and twice he spared him, and would not be persuaded to injure a hair upon his head,-who, when he fell in high places, was lamented over by David with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacrilegious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and also in domestic affections, he was not. less notable than in heroic endowments; and in piety to God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bedchamber in the dead of night; his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death; his food he had to seek at the risk of sacrilege; for a refuge from death, to cast himself upon the people of Gath, to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughing-stock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph,-in the weariness of which he had power to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and, by the generosity of his deeds and the affectionate language which flowed from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of King Saul? King David was a man extreme in all his excellencies, a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action,in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we

wonder not. We rather wonder that, tried by such extremes, his mighty spirit should not more often have burst control, and done vengeance on the conqueror, the avenger, and the destroyer.

To conceive aright the gracefulness and strength of King David's character, we must draw him into comparison with others in a similar condition, and then we shall see what hero in the world can vie with him. Conceive a man who had saved his country and clothed himself with gracefulness and renown in the sight of all the people by the chivalry of his deeds, won for himself intermarriage with the royal line, and by unction of the Lord's prophet been set apart to the throne itself; conceive such a one driven with fury from house and hold, and through tedious years deserted of every stay but Heaven, with no soothing sympathies of quiet life,— harassed forever between famine and the edge of the sword, and kept in savage holds and deserts, and tell us, in the annals of men, of one so disappointed, so bereaved and straitened, maintaining not fortitude alone, but a sweet composure; inditing praise to no avenging Deity, and couching songs in no revengeful mood, according with his outcast and unsocial life, but inditing praises to the God of mercy,-not, indeed, without the burst of sorrow and the complaint of solitariness, and prophetic warnings to his bloodthirsty foes, but ever closing in sweet preludes of good to come, and desire of present contentment. Find us such a one in the annals of men, and we yield the argument of this