Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. The sister arts of poetry and music seem to have been consecrated from their infancy. In the most ancient literature of the world, the most ancient poems were songs of praise. When Moses a second time published the law, immediately before his death, he taught the people a song, to be transmitted to successive generations; and the later prophets and sages of Israel renewed from age to age, the echo of divine minstrelsy. The seer played upon the harp, while future scenes became present to his soul; and the Iu'll of the temple resounded to the psaltery, the cymbal, and the voice of sacred song. In the Book of Psalms we possess at once the lyric poetry of the Jewish nation, and the inspired prayers and praises of holy men of old. The entire collection has commonly been named the Psalms of David, because most of them were the work of that sweet singer of Israel. Many, however, were written by other authors, at various periods between the age of Moses and the return from the captivity ; a space of a thousand years. The time at which inscriptions were prefixed to so many of the Psalms, is uncertain; but the circumstance that these inscriptions are not universal, and the arguments which seem to shew the incorrectness of some of them, forbid us to believe that they were added in the days of the authors themselves. Some of them are directions to the master of the music, as well as indications of the writer or occasion; and it is not improbable that in the time of the second temple, all these inscriptions were prepared, the names of the several authors being given, so far as they had been transmitted by special traditions. Of the fifty-one anonymous Psalms, a considerable portion must certainly be ascribed to David. Theefforts of some commentators to fix or conjecture the...