And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping
  behind her to Bahurim.  Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. 
  And he returned.

Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul’s daughter, as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone to weep in his bed: 

  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 thigh, O most mighty ...  And in thy
  majesty ride prosperously.