XXI.

SOLOMON.

JAGNIFICENCE is the main quality of Israel's "grand monarque," as Coleridge calls him. The frequent sublimity and the fluctuating interest which surrounded

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his father's career he possessed not. But the springtide of success which was his history, the abundance of his peace, his inexhaustible wealth, the pomp of his establishment, the splendor of the house and the temple which he built, the variety of his gifts and accomplishments, the richness and diversified. character of his writings, and the manifold homage paid him by surrounding tribes and monarchs,-all proclaimed him “ every inch a king," and have rendered "Solomon and his glory" proverbial to this hour. He sat, too, in the centre of a widespread commerce, bringing in its yearly tribute of wealth to his treasury and of fame to his name. Even when he sinned, it was with a high hand, on a large scale and with a certain regal gusto; he did not, like common sinners, sip at the cup of corruption, but drank of it "deep and large," emptying it to the dregs. When satiety invaded his spirit, that too was of a colossal character, and for a season darkened all objects with the shade of "vanity and vexation of spirit." And when he suffered, his groans seemed those of a demigod in torment; his head became waters, and his eyes fountains of tears. Thus, on all his sides, bright or black, he was equally and roundly great. Like a pyramid, the shadow he cast. in one direction was as vast as the light he received on the other.

No monarch in history can be compared, on the whole, with Solomon. From the Nebuchadnezzars, the Tamerlanes, and similar "thunderbolts of war," he differs in kind as well as in degree. He was the peaceful temple; they were the armed towers: his wisdom was greater than his strength; they were sceptred barbarians, strong in their military prowess. In accomplishments, and in the combination of good sense with genius, he reminds us of Julius Cæsar; but he too was a man of war from his youth, besides being guilty of crimes, both against his country and his own person, blacker far than any recorded of the proverbialist of Israel-a union, let us rather call him, of some of the qualities of the "good Haroun Alraschid" with some of those of Alfred the Great. To the Oriental grandeur-the love of peace, poetry and pleasure which distinguished the caliph-he added the king's sense of justice, and homely, practical wisdom.

It was his first to prove to the world that peace has greater triumphs and richer glories than war. All the useful as well as elegant arts found in him at once a pattern and a patron. He collected the floating wisdom of his country, after having intermingled it with his own, into compact shape. He framed a rude and stuttering science, beautiful, doubtless, in its simplicity, when he "spake of all manner of trees," from the cedar to the hyssop. He summoned into being the power of commerce, and its infant feats were mighty, and seemed, in that day, magical. He began to bind hostile countries together by the mild tie of barter-a lesson which might have been taught him, in the forest of Lebanon, by the interchange between the "gold clouds metropolitan" above and the soft valleys of Eden below. He built palaces of new and noble architecture; and although no pictures adorned the gates of the temple, or shone above the altar of incense, or met the eyes of the thousands who worshiped within the court of the Gentiles, yet was not that temple itself-with its roof of marble and gold, its flights of steps, its altars of steaming incense, its cherubic shapes, its bulls and molten sea-one picture,