Excerpt from Bible Ideals: A Literary Study, Especially of the Idealization and Poetry Found in the Scriptures

This book attempts to reveal some of the literary glories of the Bible. Shakespeare is great, but the Bible is shown to be transcendently greater. Tennyson is beautiful, but the Bible, has a beauty, a splendor, a spiritual touch that only God can give. All through the book the Biblical poems are com pared with the best of the world's literature, and their great superiority pointed out. There is also a constant comparison with other poems of Holy Writ.

The literary beauties of the Bible have but to be seen by the Bible student to cause him to leave it for no other book. In it he finds the most charming lyrics, the most thrilling epics, the world's best idyls, unlimited sonnets, in spiring Odes, lyrics of consolation not elsewhere found, in comparable short stories, letters, orations, picture galleries of portraits, doom forms, the dramatic in all of its marvelous attractiveness and earth's most heavenly rhapsodies. The present work is but an introduction to the world of truth and beauty portrayed in the Bible with divine touch.

Just as over half of present day poetry is in a prose dress, so it is with most of the poetry of the Bible. Poetry must be remembered as creative literature, and not necessarily written in verse. Viewed from a literary standpoint, the poems from Genesis to Revelation are as a series of lovely parks girding the earth.

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