’That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?...

’Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked in the search of the deep?...

’Declare, if thou knowest it all!...

’Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?’ etc.

Compare with this Isaiah xl. verse 12, etc.

Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized.

’Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts:  all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.’—­Psalm 42.

’Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.  I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.’—­Psalm 69.

There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see Job xl. and xli.).  Personifications, as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only called upon to sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for instance, in 2 Samuel i.: 

’Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings:  for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as if he had not been anointed with oil.’

The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and the glance fixed upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying detail of phenomena.  His imagination ranged the universe with the wings of the wind, and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, but only, so to speak, in passing; it never rested there, but hurried past the boundaries of earth to Jehovah’s throne, and from that height looked down upon creation.

The attitude of the Greek was very different.  Standing firmly rooted in the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye for beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its finest detail.  His was the race of the beautiful, the first in history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art and science enriched all after times with lasting standards of the great and beautiful.

The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with the centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the line of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a backward movement—­a zigzag.