“Where, he cries, shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding.  Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living.  The depth said, it is not with me; and the sea said, it is not in me.  It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.* God understandeth the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries of the world which He has made].  And unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding.” ____

* An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries.  The birds, as the inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between heaven and earth. ____

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over.  There is no clearer or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it.  His evil had turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which bound him to lower things.  He had felt that he could do without happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling to Him.  But he is not described as of preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human tenderness and susceptibility.  His old life was still beautiful to him.  He does not hate it, because he can renounce it; and now that the struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes:  he turns back to earth, to linger over those old departed days, with which the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain of plaintive, but resigned melancholy.  Once more he throws himself on God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.+ And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it could not have come before) the answer out of the whirlwind.  Job had called on Him had prayed that He might appear, that he might plead his cause with Him; and now He comes, and what will Job do?  He comes not as the healing spirit in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God, the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the glory of it.  Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with Him on His government.  The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting.  The revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern Faust; but when he sinks crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart, struck down in his pride—­for he had himself, partially at least, subdued his own presumption—­but as a humble penitent, struggling to overcome his weakness.  He abhors himself for his murmurs, and “repents in dust and ashes.”  It will have occurred to every one that the secret which has been revealed