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Page 22
And the poets sank again into talk.
"You see it," said the old Philistine. "He paints the picture. David
sings the life of the picture."
"Yes: Homer sees what he sings; David feels his song."
"Homer's is perfect in its description."
"Yes; but for life, for the soul of the description, you need the
Hebrew."
"Homer might be blind; and, with that fancy and word-painting power of
his, and his study of everything new, he would paint pictures as he
sang, though unseen."
"Yes," said another; "but David--" And he paused.
"But David?" asked the chief.
"I was going to say that he might be blind, deaf, imprisoned, exiled,
sick, or all alone, and that yet he would never know he was alone;
feeling as he does, as he must to sing so, of the presence of this Lord
of his!"
"He does not think of a snow-flake, but as sent from him."
"While the snow-flake is reminding Homer of that hard, worrying,
slinging work of battle. He must have seen fight himself."
They were hushed again. For, though they no longer dared ask the poets
to sing to them,--so engrossed were they in each other's society,--the
soldiers were hardly losers from this modest courtesy. For the poets
were constantly arousing each other to strike a chord, or to sing some
snatch of remembered song. And so it was that Homer, _�propos_ of I do
not know what, sang in a sad tone:--
"Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies;
They fall successive, and successive rise.
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those have passed away."[D]
David waited for a change in the strain; but Homer stopped. The young
Hebrew asked him to go on; but Homer said that the passage which
followed was mere narrative, from a long narrative poem. David looked
surprised that his new friend had not pointed a moral as he sang; and
said simply, "We sing that thus:--
"As for man, his days are as grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth;
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone,
And the place thereof shall know it no more.
But the mercy of the Lord
Is from everlasting to everlasting
Of them that fear him;
And his righteousness
Unto children's children,
To such as keep his covenant,
As remember his commandments to do them!"
Homer's face flashed delighted. "I, like you, 'keep his covenant,'" he
cried; and then without a lyre, for his was still in David's hands, he
sang, in clear tone:--
"Thou bid'st me birds obey;--I scorn their flight,
If on the left they rise, or on the right!
Heed them who may, the will of Jove I own,
Who mortals and immortals rules alone!"[E]
"That is more in David's key," said the young Philistine harper, seeing
that the poets had fallen to talk together again. "But how would it
sound in one of the hymns on one of our feast-days?"
"Who mortals and immortals rules alone."
"How, indeed?" cried one of his young companions. "There would be more
sense in what the priests say and sing, if each were not quarrelling for
his own,--Dagon against Astarte, and Astarte against Dagon."
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