did pleased all the people.  For all the people understood that day that it was not of the king to slay Abner the son of Ner.”  His policy was to conciliate and unite.  When Saul’s son was slain by his own servants, who thought to please David by that act, he immediately put them to death.  Equally cautious and judicious was his course in transferring the Ark and its worship to Jerusalem.  He did this only gradually, and as he saw that the people were prepared for it.

We next will look at David in his character as man of genius, musician, artist, poet.  It is not often that an eminent statesman and soldier is, at the same time, a distinguished poet and writer.  Sometimes they can write history or annals, like Caesar and Frederick the Great; but the imaginative and poetic element is rarely found connected with the determined will and practical intellect of a great commander.  Alexander the Great had a taste for good poetry, for he carried Homer with him through his campaigns; but the taste of Napoleon went no higher than a liking for Ossian.

But David was a poet, in whom the tender, lyrical, personal element rose to the highest point.  The daring soldier, when he took his harp, became another man.  He consoled himself and sought comfort in trial, and sang his thankfulness in his hours of joy.  The Book of Psalms, so far as it is the work of David, is the record of his life.  As Horace says of Lucilius and his book of Odes, that the whole of the old man’s life hangs suspended therein in votive pictures; and as Goethe says that his Lyrics are a book of confessions, in which joy and sorrow turn to song; so the Book of Psalms can only be understood when we consider it as David’s poetical autobiography.  In this he anticipates the Koran, which was the private journal of Mohammed.

“The harp of David,” says Herder, “was his comforter and friend.  In his youth he sang to its music while tending his flocks as a shepherd on the mountains of Judaea.  By its means he had access to Saul, and could sooth with it the dark mood of the king.  In his days of exile he confided to it his sorrows.  When he triumphed over his enemies the harp became in his royal hands a thank-offering to the deity.  Afterward he organized on a magnificent scale music and poetry in the worship of God.  Four thousand Levites, distinguished by a peculiar dress, were arranged in classes and choirs under master-singers, of whom the three most distinguished, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, are known to us by specimens of their art.  In his Psalms his whole kingdom lives.”

We speak of the inspiration of genius, and distinguish it from the inspiration of the religious teacher.  But in ancient times the prophet and poet were often the same, and one word (as, in Latin, “vates”) was used for both.  In the case of David the two inspirations were perfectly at one.  His religion was poetry, and his poetry was religion.  The genius of his poetry is not grandeur, but beauty.  Sometimes