When Israel went out of Egypt,
     The house of Jacob from a people of strange language

such pomposity as

     When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son
     After long toil their liberty had won—­

or against

  O give thanks.... 
  To him that stretched out the earth above the waters: 
     for his mercy endureth for ever. 
  To him that made great lights: 
     for his mercy endureth for ever

such stuff as

     Who did the solid earth ordain
     To rise above the watery plain;
       For his mercies aye endure,
       Ever faithful, ever sure.
     Who, by his all-commanding might,
     Did fill the new-made world with light;
       For his mercies aye endure,
       Ever faithful, ever sure.

verses yet further weakened by the late Sir William Baker for “Hymns Ancient and Modern.”

It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as little above those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of those of Tate and Brady:  for Milton made them at fifteen years old, and he who afterwards consecrated his youth to poetry soon learned to know better.  And yet, bearing in mind the passages in “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” which paraphrase the Scriptural narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though as an artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite won to knowing the simple fact that the thing had already been done and surpassingly well done:  he, who did so much to liberate poetry from rhyme—­he—­even he who in the grand choruses of “Samson Agonistes” did so much to liberate it from strict metre never quite realised, being hag-ridden by the fetish that rides between two panniers, the sacred and the profane, that this translation of “Job” already belongs to the category of poetry, is poetry, already above metre, and in rhythm far on its way to the insurpassable.  If rhyme be allowed to that greatest of arts, if metre, is not rhythm above both for her service?  Hear in a sentence how this poem uplifts the rhythm of the Vulgate: 

  Ecce, Deus magnus vincens scientiam nostram; numerus annorum
  ejus inestimabilis!

But hear, in a longer passage, how our English rhythm swings and sways to the Hebrew parallels: 

Surely there is a mine for silver, And a place for gold which they refine.  Iron is taken out of the earth, And brass is molten out of the stone. Man setteth an end to darkness, And searcheth out to the furthest bound The stones of thick darkness and of the shadow of death.  He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn; They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by; They hang afar from men, they swing to and fro.  As for the earth, out of it cometh bread:  And underneath it is turned up as it were by fire.  The atones thereof are the place of sapphires, And