failure of equivalent words, it has been said, or even of equivalent idioms, there is always some mode of expression which will indicate precisely what is meant. But this assertion, so far as it is true at all, is true only of what we have called the idea or thought, as mostly knowledge or fact for the intellect. Even here it becomes false so far as the idea (as is often the case) is inseparable from and dependent on the emotion; but when the latter element is predominant, and becomes the great thing in a sentence, then these expedients fail through overdoing or deficiency. The life of the passage is almost sure to receive some hurt. The periphrasis buries it, the loss of a figure obscures it, the change of idiom destroys it. Take away its conciseness and its strength is gone; add words for the clearance of the conception and the emotion dies. That conciseness, that peculiar collocation of words, belong as much to the true spiritual utterance as the very words and grammatical forms themselves. Sometimes there may be happy substitutions that will approach the same effect; but in general, unless something like the original form is preserved, the thought may indeed survive, though marred and mutilated, but the subtle spiritual aroma, the emotional essence, perishes in the transmission. We may, indeed, logically describe it, or attempt to describe it, but it is like the dissection of a dead form. We only see where life was; we behold not the life itself. If we cannot imitate this essential conciseness, then must we preserve what we can of the thought in some other mode of expression, trusting that the reader may catch the emotion, even as a good ear may catch the modulation, and even take pleasure in it, though the chords be badly played, and the instrument be out of tune. If he have music in his own soul the emotion may revive again, though so greatly weakened in the passage from one spirit to another. The only effectual remedy, however, is such a familiarity with the original, such a constant reading without any construing medium, that at last a person begins to think in it, and what is more to feel in it, as he does in his native tongue.

There are many cases, however, when this essential conciseness, or this essentiality of form, in the original, may be imitated, (sometimes with immediate happy effect,) although such form may be strange, abrupt, or perhaps wholly unknown in

the language to which the transfer is made. A translator is sometimes justified in thus transplanting idioms just as they stand. Instead of deserving condemnation as an innovator, he may, if he does it carefully and intelligently, be the means of enriching his own native tongue. He may introduce into it exotics which not only live but grow luxuriantly in the new soil, though far away, it may be, both in space and time, from their ancient fatherland. Much was done in this way in the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into English. It has brought in orientalisms, giving new beauty as well as strength to the language. These were unknown to the older Saxon and Norman. Some of them doubtless sounded strange and harsh at first; but now that they have become naturalized, they are our richest gems of speech, the very life, if not of our common, at least of our sacred or devotional language.

A careful examination of many passages of the Hebrew Scriptures has convinced us that this transplanting process might have been carried much farther with great advantage to philology as well as religion. In other words, there are many cases where the Hebrew might have been rendered into English with an exact literalness, which, although sounding strange at first, two hundred years' use would have so naturalized that, along with the exotic forms, would have come all that strength and fullness of emotion now lost in the italics and attempted paraphrases through which, it was thought, the strangeness would be disguised.

General remarks of this kind are imperfectly understood without direct application. Not to make, therefore, our introductory argument too long, we would refer the reader to some of those numerous examples in the Bible where there is an attempt to help out the translation by means of italics. These, it is commonly said, are not additions, nor even modifications, but only the expression of what is virtually in the sense, though absent from the form of the ancient language. This is true, and doubtless necessary, in regard to the majority of what may be called the minor instances, such as the supply of an English particle, an English preposition, or an English substantive verb, when they are supposed to be virtually included in some peculiar position or change of form in the original words to whose rendering they are attached. It may be a question, however,

whether even in cases of this kind, or in those that are seemingly such, there has not been a too frequent use of this method, often to the weakening of the emotion, and, in many instances, to the obscuring of the thought. There is a vast difference between the logical assertion of a fact, and an exclamation of musing wonder in the subjective contemplation of such a fact or truth, taken as undisputed. It is all the difference, oftentimes, between devotional and didactic language; and yet it is this difference, or the want of this difference, which the translators have sometimes made to depend on the insertion in italics of an is or an and, or the putting in an article or a preposition when they are not wanted, or the leaving them out when the original, either in its direct words or its idiomatic forms, demanded them as its indispensable representatives.

"From everlasting unto everlasting thou art God," Psalm xc, 2; or, "From everlasting unto everlasting thou, O God." In the first there is given in italics the word supplied by our translators, doubtless because they deemed it indispensable to the sense, and therefore virtually contained in the original. Of this, however, there may be a question. Let the reader compare the two versions one the exact Hebrew without addition or diminution, only thrown into the vocative form which requires no outward aid; the other helped, as it is supposed, by the assertive copula. This latter is a logical or didactic assertion of God's eternity as a fact; the other assumes it as the ground of a devotional or strictly subjective address. The emotion is prominent in the one, the mere idea in the other. Or rather, we may say, the one contains the thought alone; the other the thought equally clear, if not more clear, because seen through the clarifying medium of the heavenly emotion it carries with it.

Compare with this the perfectly similar place, Psalm xlv, 7. Had the translators rendered here as they have done in the ninetieth Psalm it would have been, "Thy throne is God forever and ever," as the antitrinitarians contend it should be rendered here and in Hebrew i, 8, although they would in reality gain nothing doctrinally by it. The great objection is that the useless filling up does equally, in both cases, destroy the subjective or emotional power of the language, besides giving a

different aspect to the thought. "Thy throne, O God, forever and ever:" "From everlasting to everlasting, Thou." The substantive verb, which the translators have inserted in the one case and omitted in the other, is equally defensible, or equally objectionable, in both passages.

"From everlasting unto everlasting thou." Compare this expressive second person with a similar abrupt use of the third, in Psalm cii, 28, 7, "Thou, He." "For thou art He, and of thy years there is no end." The translators have rendered it, "Thou art the same." In this they have been governed by the LXX, and their version as quoted Heb. i, 12: Σù de ó avros εi-Tu autem idem ipse es. The insertion of the substantive verb here has a stronger ground than usual, because of the fact that the Hebrew pronoun & has in itself, sometimes, something of an assertive or verbal nature, as in Psalm 1, 5: “For God himself is judge;". It would seem to be allied to

, the verb of being, and thus to be in the root of the great name announced to Moses in Exod. iii, 14: "Thou art He;" Thou art Jehovah; 'O ON, "The same yesterday, to-day, and forever." The assertion "Thou art God" may have great force and solemnity according to the connection in which it is found; but it has the appearance of a tautology, a truism, or an identical proposition, and this thought, perhaps, led the LXX to avoid it by taking 3, with a different vowel punctuation, for the negative particle of prohibition, and attaching it to the subsequent clause-ἀπὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος καὶ ἕως τοῦ αἰῶνος συ εἶμὴ ἀποστ τρέψης TPÉÝNS K. T. 2.: "From eternity unto eternity thou; O turn not man again, eiç Tanelvwow, to his humiliation," to his lowly primal state of dust and dissolution. The form of earnest deprecating prayer thus given to it has an exceeding pathos from the contrast between the divine eternity, the divine unchangeableness, and our frail dissolving forms. The Septuagint version cannot be justified, and yet this touching contrast still remains in almost any version that can be made of the passage, only the more touching the more concise it is and antithetical. In any view we can take, the rendering which is most abrupt, nearest to the words and structure of the original Hebrew, is the one that carries the highest power of emotion with the greatest vividness of idea. It is the same thought, the same contrast, the same emotional utterance, Psalm cii, 27: Ipsi pereunt tu

autem permanes, tu ipse, et anni tui non deficient. They perish but thou remainest ever-permanes-remainest through, surviving all change. "Thou art He, and thy years never end." All such passages are more or less soliloquizing. It is the soul talking to itself its thought of God. Knowing its own thought and its own deep feeling, it has no need of connective terms or logical formulæ to help it understand itself. It only needs that the reader should come into the same subjective state to feel that the words are sufficient, that there is a swelling significance in their very omissions, and that any filling up, unless the idiom of the translating language imperatively demand it, adds nothing to the thought, while it greatly weakens the emotional power.

"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." Psalm xiv, 1: "The fool says in his heart, no God." How slight the outward change, and yet how striking the difference of force and meaning! The soliloquizing character of the passage is determined by the first clause: "Hath said in his heart." It is a Hebraism equivalent to, "He thinks to himself;" just as onμì is often used in Greek, especially in Homer. See Iliad. 237. But we see the thing itself in the exact rendering of the second clause thus stripped of the form of an outward logical judgment, and presented as a thought or musing of the mind. It is the fool talking to himself, or rather, his foolish thoughts talking to one another. There is no need, therefore, of the logical copula. That is only wanted to bind it together when it is supposed to pass, as a formal didactic proposition, from one mind to another.

And so again, Psalm x, 4: "He will not seek; God is not in all his thoughts." There is in the Hebrew here no true substantive verb, although the negative is regarded as having something of an assertive force, and there is no preposition before "thoughts." The italics supplying it are not needed at all. The insertion of in changes the thought, while it greatly weakens its force and impressiveness. "No God, all his thoughts." The first rendering, we say, fails to give even the idea. It is not an occasional forgetfulness, or even an habitual mindlessness. His whole soul is Godless. His whole evil soul, we might say, since the Hebrew nim is generally taken of evil thoughts, prava consilia. His conceptions, his ideas, his emo