So much depends on the music
of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at
the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom
possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions,
metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the
original. Before taking some of the Prophet's renderings of the more
concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of
his moral reflections in verse--Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of
abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:--

Cursed the wight that trusteth in man
Making flesh his stay!
[And his heart from the Lord is turned]
Like some desert-scrub shall he be,
Nor see any coming of good,
But dwell in the aridest desert,
A salt, uninhabited land.
Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord,
And the Lord is his trust!
He like a tree shall be planted by waters,
That stretches its roots to the stream,
Unafraid(73) at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green.
Sans care in a year of drought,
He fails not in yielding his fruit.

As here, so generally, the simplicity of the poet's diction is matched by
that of his metaphors, similes, and parables. A girl and her ornaments, a
man and his waist-cloth--thus he figures what ought to be the clinging
relations between Israel and their God. The stunted desert-shrub in
contrast to the river-side oaks, the incomparable olive, the dropped sheaf
and even the dung upon the fields; the vulture, stork, crane and swift;
the lion, wolf and spotted leopard coming up from the desert or the
jungles of Jordan; the hinnying stallions and the heifer in her heat; the
black Ethiopian, already familiar in the streets of Jerusalem, the potter
and his wheel, the shepherd, plowman and vinedresser, the driver with his
ox's yoke upon his shoulders; the harlot by the wayside; the light in the
home and sound of the hand-mill--all everyday objects of his people's sight
and hearing as they herded, ploughed, sowed, reaped or went to market in
the city--he brings them in simply and with natural ease as figures of the
truths he is enforcing. They are never bald or uncouth, though in
translation they may sometimes sound so.

In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as
in the following--a passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.(74)
The Deity is addressing the