The method in which Mr. Longfellow has told the story of Hiawatha-the hero of miraculous birth, who was sent among the Indians to clear their rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and who taught them many other elevating arts, especially that of picture-writing-is singularly well fitted for its purpose. The metre has precisely the mixture of simplicity and sweet wild strangeness that marks the matter. Whether he tells of Old Nokomis the nurse, or the visit to the old arrow maker, and Hiawatha's wooing and wedding of Minnehaha, Laughing Water, or the picture of the Famine, or the White Man's Foot, all is touched with the breath of the forest.

Very picturesque and faithful is the account of Hiawatha's wooing and wedding, and also of his journey homeward with Minnehaha. It certainly has all the colour, all the subdued stir and glow of the forest

All the travelling winds went with them,
O'er the meadow, through the forest;
All the stars of night looked at them,
Watched with sleepless eyes their slumber;
From his ambush in the oak-tree
Peeped the squirrel, Adjidaumo,
Watched with eager eyes the lovers;
And the rabbit, the Wabasso,
Scampered from the path before them,
Peering, peeping from his burrow,
Sat erect upon his haunches,
Watched with curious eyes the lovers.
Pleasant was the journey homeward!
All the birds sang loud and sweetly
Songs of happiness and heart's-ease;
Sang the blue bird, the Owaissa,

Happy are you, Hiawatha,

Having such a wife to love!'

Sang the Opochee, the Robin,

'Happy are you, Laughing Water,

Having such a noble husband.'

From the sky the sun benignant

Looked upon them through the branches,
Saying to them, 'O my children,

Love is sunshine, hate is shadow,

Life is chequered shade and sunshine,

Rule by love, O Hiawatha !'

From the sky the moon looked at them,

Filled the lodge with mystic splendours,
Whispered to them, 'O my children,

Day is restless, night is quiet,

Man imperious, woman feeble;

Half is mine, although I follow;

Rule by patience, Laughing Water!'

Even here there steals in some suggestion of the tone of

regret of which we have spoken, justifying fully what we have said on that point and its bearing on Longfellow's general conceptions of life.

Finally, we must add that the departure of Hiawatha from among his people, for the good of his people, is touched with the true glamour of legend, but it is spiritualized and beautified in the light of a later gospel. It is here that the Puritan sentiment, which so informs all Mr. Longfellow's poems, comes into play in this poem where we should least expect to find it.

Forth into the village went he,
Bade farewell to all the warriors,
Bade farewell to all the young men,
Spake persuading, spake in this wise:
I am going, O my people,
On a long and distant journey;
Many moons and many winters
Will have come, and will have vanished,

Ere I come again to see you.

But my guests I leave behind me;
Listen to their words of wisdom,
Listen to the truth they tell you,

For the Master of Life hath sent them
From the land of light and morning!'
On the shore stood Hiawatha,
Turned and waved his hand at parting;
On the clear and luminous water
Launched his birch-canoe for sailing,
From the pebbles of the margin
Shoved it forth into the water:
Whispered to it, Westward! westward!'
And with speed it darted forward.

And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water

One long track and trail of splendour,
Down whose stream as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapours,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.

And the people from the margin
Watched him floating, rising, sinking,
Till the birch canoe seemed lifted
High into that sea of splendour,
Till it sank into the vapours
Like the new moon, slowly, slowly
Sinking in the purple distance.

And they said, Farewell for ever!'
Said Farewell, O Hiawatha !'

And the forests, dark and lonely,

Moved through all their depths of darkness,
Sighed, 'Farewell, O Hiawatha!'

6

And the waves upon the margin
Rising, rippling on the pebbles,
Sobbed, Farewell, O Hiawatha!'
And the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
From her haunts among the fenlands
Screamed, Farewell, O Hiawatha!'
Thus departed Hiawatha,

Hiawatha the Beloved,

In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the North-west wind Keewaydin,
To the islands of the Blessed,
To the kingdom of Ponemah,

To the land of the Hereafter.

The peculiar idea of a mysterious disappearance into an unknown and yet not an unblessed region, at once brings 'Hiawatha' into association with that wonderful circle of legend, of which Mr. Moncure Conway has written so interestingly in his suggestive volume titled, The Wandering Jew.' It is here that Puritanism, with its constant sense of a mysterious spiritual world which lies around us, and may at any moment claim us, weds with the wild instinctive religious longings of the savage man. Mr. Longfellow has found for both a justification and a home in the imagination; and has made us feel that no form of life is without relation to other forms, that whatever sects may do, the poet cannot absolutely anathematize anything; but in finding its point of universality finds also its point of beauty, and thus adds a new element to our common humanity and its possibilities of sympathetic comprehension.

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.

ART. III. The Hittites and the Bible.

My thesis is that the statements of the Bible with reference to the Hittites are fully confirmed by the cumulative evidence of modern discovery, and I shall endeavour to show that the light of the nineteenth century A.D. reveals the existence of a Hittite power in the nineteenth century B.C., and enables us to follow the fortunes of that power down to 717 B.C., when the Hittite empire was finally crushed on the fatal field of Carchemish. I hope not only to prove the Bible true by contemporary and corroborative evidence, but also to show that a great empire, forgotten by ancient and modern his

torians, must be restored to the ancient kingdoms of the world. By confirming the Bible we shall discover a lost empire.

It is desirable that this investigation should be undertaken, because the casual references to the Hittites in the Bible have been used by the enemies of Divine revelation to discredit the historical accuracy of the book, and some of the weak friends of the Bible have begun to propagate doubt where they cannot disprove.

In 1857 Professor F. W. Newman, fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in his History of the Hebrew Monarchy,' * speaks of the Bible references to the Hittites as 'unhistorical,' and as 'not exhibiting the writer's acquaintance with the times in a very favourable light,' and the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, Fellow of the same college, writing on the Hittites, in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' + last year, treats the Bible statements regarding the Hittites as unhistorical and unworthy of credence. Referring to the mention of the Hittites in the Book of Genesis, he says,The lists of these pre-Israelitish populations cannot be taken as strictly historical documents,' they cannot be taken as of equal authority with Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions; and, carrying out his comparison, he adds, 'Not less unfavourable to the accuracy of the Old Testament references to the Hittites is the evidence deducible from proper names.'‡ I shall examine these references to the Bible in the light of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions when I come to the passages referred to. It is enough here to draw attention to the manner and progress of unbelief. Professor Newman discredits what he does not understand, and Mr. Cheyne, mistaking the arrogance of scepticism for disproved facts, accepts his predecessor's conclusions, and gives them the wider currency of his own credit.

**

Pp. 178, 179.

+ Vol. xii.

The insinuation in this passage clearly is that the Bible assumed, by the use of Semitic names, that the Hittites were of Semitic origin. Mr. Cheyne mentions Ephron, Ahimelech, and Uriah, and he asks, 'Is it unnatural to infer that these three names are no less fictitious than the Semitic names ascribed in the Old Testament to the non-Semitic Philistines?' The Bible is therefore wrong, and the names-Hittite and Philistine-are fictitious. But what saith the Bible itself? It says without any reservation that the Hittites were Canaanites (Gen. x. 15). And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth.' It must be borne in mind that Oriental names are to a large extent significates. Men receive names according to some personal peculiarity or striking circumstances. I knew a youth in Syria called the father of two blue eyes' until he grew up, and then he was called the father of a red beard.' My landlord in Damascus was called the father of a nose,' Moses was his name, and in my house his sobriquet was translated into Mozambique.' With a Semitic people there was nothing more natural than that a Hittite, with an unpronounceable name, on attaching himself to King David when an outlaw, should be called Ahimelech, the brother, or friend, of the king.

·

·

The Egyptian inscriptions are much occupied with a great and warlike people called the Khita, the centre of whose power lay north of Syria, in the region of the Orontes and upper Euphrates. These are called in the Assyrian inscriptions Khatti, and may be identified with the Hittites of the Bible, the radical letters of the name in each language being the same.*

In 1872 I was able to send plaster casts to England of curious inscriptions which had been noticed in Hamath by Burckhardt in 1812. Along with these I sent a memorandum which was printed in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund,' t and a detailed statement, which appeared in 'The British and Foreign Evangelical Review,' giving my reasons for believing that the curious inscriptions were nothing less than Hittite remains. My theory has since received many confirmations, and is now very generally accepted by Oriental scholars. Vigorous explorations have brought to light similar inscriptions throughout an extended region north of Syria, and at the present moment able and painstaking scholars are eagerly engaged in tracing, among the arrowy records of Assyria, and the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the long lost history of the Hittite people.

In supporting my thesis I shall first summarize the Bible references to the Hittites.

Then I shall examine these Bible references in the light of the recently read inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria.

And, lastly, I shall refer more fully to the recently discovered Hittite remains.

I. BIBLE REFERENCES TO THE HITTITES.

We find the Hittites among the settled inhabitants of Canaan while as yet Abraham was only a wandering sheikh. By peaceful pastoral pursuits, and by skill and valour in war, Abraham had attained to a high position of wealth and influence. He finds himself, however, in the land of the stranger, with no sons to support or succeed him, and the only heir to his wealth and fame Eliezer, a Damascene, and when, in presence of the uncertain future, he begins to despond, the Lord appears to him and renews his former promises, and in addition makes with him a new covenant, that his own children shall possess the land then occupied by the Hittites and

Mr. Gladstone identifies the Keteioi of Homer, Od. xi. 521, with the Hittites ('Homeric Synchronism,' pp. 174, 182). January, 1874.

† April, 1873.