PROSE COMPOSITIONS. REMARKS ON THE ENGLISH POETS. IMITATIONS. THE sublimity and unaffected beauty of the sacred writings are in no instance more conspicuous than in the following verses of the 18th Psalm : : "He bowed the heavens also and came down and darkness was under his feet." "And he rode upon a cherub and did fly: yea he did fly upon the wings of the wind." None of our better versions have been able to preserve the original graces of these verses. That wretched one of Thomas Sternhold, however (which, to the disgrace and manifest detriment of religious worship, is generally used), has, in this solitary instance, and then perhaps by accident, given us the true spirit of the Psalmist, and has surpassed not only Merrick, but even the classic Buchanan.* This version is as follows: That the reader may judge for himself, Buchanan's translation is subjoined 66 Utque suum dominum terræ demittat in orbem Leniter inclinat jussum fastigia cœlum; This is somewhat too harsh and prosaic, and there is an unpleasant caco phony in the terminations of the fifth and sixth lines. "The Lord descended from above, "On cherubs and on cherubims And on the wings of mighty winds Dryden honored these verses with very high commendation, and, in the following lines of his Annus Mirabilis, has apparently imitated them, in preference to the original. "The duke less numerous, but in courage more, And in his Ceyx and Alcyone, from Ovid, he has― "And now sublime she rides upon the wind," Thus which is probably imitated, as well as most of the following, not from Sternhold, but the original. Pope, "Not God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storm and rides upon the wind." And Addison "Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." The unfortunate Chatterton has "And rides upon the pinions of the wind." And Gray "With arms sublime that float upon the air." Few poets of eminence have less incurred the charge of plagiarism than Milton; yet many instances might be adduced of similarity of idea and language with the Scripture, which are certainly more than coincidences; and some of these I shall, in a future number, present to your readers. Thus the present passage in the Psalmist was in all probability in his mind when he wrote "And with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like, sat'st brooding on the vast abyss." The third verse of the 104th Psalm, PAR. LOST, 1. 20, b.i. "He maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind," is evidently taken from the beforementioned verses in the 18th Psalm, on which it is perhaps an improvement. It has also been imitated by two of our first poets, Shakspeare and Thomson. The former in Romeo and Juliet, "Bestrides the lazy paced clouds, And sails upon the bosom of the air." The latter in Winter, 1. 199— ""Till Nature's King who oft Amid tempestuous darkness dwells alone, And on the wings of the careering winds As these imitations have not before, I believe, been noticed, they cannot fail to interest the lovers of polite letters; and they are such as at least will amuse your readers in general. If the sacred writings were attentively perused, we should find innumerable passages from which our best modern poets have drawn their most admired ideas; and the enumerations of these instances would perhaps attract the attention of many persons to those volumes, which they now perhaps think to contain everything tedious and disgusting, but which, on the contrary, they would find replete with interest, beauty, and true sublimity. STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS. MR. EDITOR, In your "Mirror" for July, a Mr. William Toone has offered a few observations on a paper of mine, in a preceding number, containing remarks on the versions and imitations of the ninth and tenth verses of the 18th Psalm, to which I think it necessary to offer a few words by way of reply; as they not only put an erroneous construction on certain passages of that paper, but are otherwise open to material objection. The object of Mr. Toone, in some parts of his observations, appears to have been to refute something which he fancied I had advanced, tending to establish the general merit of Sternhold and Hopkins' translation of the Psalms but he might have saved himself this unnecessary trouble, as I have decidedly condemned it as mere doggrel, still preserved in our churches to the detriment of religion. And the version of the passage in question is adduced as a brilliant, though probably accidental, exception to the general character of the work. What necessity, therefore, your correspondent could see for "hoping that I should think with him, that the sooner the old version of the Psalms was consigned to oblivion, the better it would be for rational devotion," I am perfectly at a loss to imagine. This concluding sentence of Mr. Toone's paper, which I consider as introduced merely by way of rounding the period, and making a graceful exit, needs no further animadversion. I shall therefore proceed to examine the objections of the "worthy clergyman of the Church of England," to these verses cited by your correspondent, by which he hopes to prove, that Dryden, Knox, and the numerous other eminent men who have expressed their admiration thereof, to be little better than idiots. The first is this: "Cherubim is the plural for Cherub; but our versioner, by adding an s to it, has rendered them both plurals." By adding an 8 to what? If the pronoun it refer to cherubim, as according to the construction of the sentence it really does, the whole objection is nonsense. But the worthy gentleman, no doubt, meant to say, that Sternhold had rendered them both plurals, by the addition of an 8 to cherub. Even in this sense, however, I conceive the charge to be easily obviated; for, though cherubim is doubtless usually considered as the plural of cherub, yet the two words are frequently so used in the Old Testament as to prove, that they were often applied to separate ranks of beings. One of these, which I shall cite, will dispel all doubt on the subject. "And within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree, each ten cubits high."-1 Kings, v. 23, chap. vii. The other objection turns upon a word with which it is not necessary for me to interfere; for I did not quote these verses as instances of the merit of Sternhold, or his version, I only asserted, that the lines which I then copied, viz., "The Lord descended from above," &c. were truly noble and sublime. Whether, therefore, Sternhold wrote all the winds (as asserted by your corre |