And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David,
Michal Saul's daughter--

Mark the three words--

Michal Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw
King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she
despised him in her heart.

The whole story goes into about ten lines. Your psychological
novelist nowadays, given the wit to invent it, would make it
cover 500 pages at least.

Or take the end of David in the first two chapters of the First
Book of Kings, with its tale of Oriental intrigues, plots,
treacheries, murderings in the depths of the horrible palace
wherein the old man is dying. Or read of Solomon and his ships
and his builders, and see his Temple growing (as Heber put it)
like a tall palm, with no sound of hammers. Or read again the end
of Queen Athaliah:

And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the
people, she came to the people into the temple of the Lord.--
And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the
manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and
all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets:
And Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried Treason, Treason.--But
Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds, the
officers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth
without the ranges....

--And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by the
which the horses came into the king's house: and there was
she slain.

Let a youngster read this, I say, just as it is written; and how
the true East--sound, scent, form, colour--pours into the
narrative!--cymbals and trumpets, leagues of sand, caravans
trailing through the heat, priest and soldiery and kings going up
between them to the altar; blood at the foot of the steps, blood
everywhere, smell of blood mingled with spices, sandal-wood, dung
of camels!

Yes, but how--if you will permit the word--how the _enjoyment_ of
it as magnificent literature might be enhanced by a scholar who
would condescend to whisper, of his knowledge, the magical word
here or there, to the child as he reads! For an instance.--

No child--no grown man with any sense of poetry--can deny his ear
to the Forty-fifth Psalm; the one that begins 'My heart is
inditing a good matter,' and plunges into a hymn of royal
nuptials. First (you remember) the singing-men, the sons of
Korah, lift their chant to the bridegroom, the King:

Gird thy sword upon thy