Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/107

a meditative and religious contemplation of the starry heavens; and throughout long periods of the Hebrew national life in which the land had its rest from war, and when the shepherd's enemy was not his fellow-man, but the wolf only, and the lion, and the bear: the shepherd—whose own the sheep were—passed his night abroad, taking his rest upon the hill-side; and these shepherds were often of a mood that led them to "consider the heavens," the work of the Creative hand; and to gather from those fields the genuine fruits of the highest philosophy—which is—a fervent piety. The Palestinian shepherd of that age did indeed misinterpret the starry heavens in a sense;—or, we should say, he was at fault in his measurement of the distance between the celestial roofing above him, and the earth on which he trod; yet, notwithstanding this error, much nearer did he come to the firmament of universal truth than does the modern atheist astronomer, who, after he has found, by parallax, the distance of the nearest of the stars, professes to see no glory in the heavens, but that of the inventors of his astronomic tools! The ladder which rested its foot upon earth, and lodged its uppermost round upon the pavement of heaven, was indeed of far greater height than the Syrian shepherd imagined it to be; nevertheless it was to him a firm ladder of truth; and upon it have passed those who have kept alive the intercourse between man and his Maker through many centuries.