pure gold.
Whence then cometh wisdom?
And where is the place of understanding?
Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living,
And kept close from the fowls of the air.
Destruction and Death say,
We have heard a rumour thereof with our ears.
God understandeth the way thereof,
And he knoweth the place thereof.
For he looketh to the ends of the earth,
And seeth under the whole heaven;
To make a weight for the wind;
Yea, he meteth out the waters by measure.
When he made a decree for the rain,
And a way for the lightning of the thunder:
Then did he see it, and declare it;
He established it, yea, and searched it out.
And unto man he said,
Behold, the fear of the Lord, _that_ is wisdom;
And to depart from evil is understanding.

Is that poetry? Surely it is poetry. Can you improve it with the
embellishments of rhyme and strict scansion? Well, sundry bold
men have tried, and I will choose, for your judgment, the
rendering of a part of the above passage by one who is by no
means the worst of them--a hardy anonymous Scotsman. His version
was published at Falkirk in 1869:

His hand on the rock the adventurer puts,
And mountains entire overturns by the roots;
New rivers in rocks are enchased by his might,
And everything precious revealed to his sight;
The floods from o'er-flowing he bindeth at will,
And the thing that is hid bringeth forth by his skill.

But where real wisdom is found can he shew?
Or the place understanding inhabiteth? No!
Men know not the value, the price of this gem;
'Tis not found in the land of the living with them.
It is not in me, saith the depth; and the sea
With the voice of an echo, repeats, Not in me.

(I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really answered, in
its northern vernacular, was 'Me either.')

Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place
Understanding hath chosen, since this is the case?...

Enough! This not only shows how that other rendering can be
spoilt even to the point of burlesque by an attempt, on
preconceived notions, to embellish it with metre and rhyme, but
it also hints that parallel verse will actually resent and abhor
such embellishment even by the most skilled hand. Yet, I repeat,
our version of "Job" is poetry undeniable. What follows?

Why, it follows that in the course of studying it as literature
we have found experimentally settled for us--and on the side of
freedom--a dispute in