One such strain preserved from any other ancient nation would establish
their claims to the highest order of poetic genius, and lead to the most
industrious and painful research for all that could throw light upon
their literature. It comes over the soul now like the full burst of
martial music. It stirs the blood and quickens the pulses with its
strain of triumph, while it melts us to pity, as it brings before us so
graphically, with such exquisite power--yet such slight allusion--the
distress and desolation of Israel. It is a finished picture of the age.
We see the judges, those that ride on white asses (still reserved for
royal stables) that walk by the way; while it gives us a full character
of Sisera and the mother who trained him. We see the mother--haughty,
proud, avaricious, surrounded by "her wise ladies," who are flatterers
rather than counsellors--ready to exult in the rapine and plunder of the
army of her son; her natural fears awakened by his delayed return, yet
hushed and soothed by the enumeration of the spoil. No feeling of pity
softening the love of vengeance,--the desire for the plunder of a
conquered people engrossing all.

And in Sisera we see the proud, cruel, licentious spoiler--all the
powers of his evil nature called into exercise by success and the long
indulgence of every evil passion and gross appetite--arrogant,
oppressive and cruel in success; abject, cowardly and overreaching in
adversity. We can well imagine the state of an oppressed people ruled by
such a man at the head of a licentious soldiery. And harsh as may seem
some of the expressions of Deborah, in her joyous outbursts of praise
and thanksgiving, they arise from the ineffable miseries, the deep
degradation, the oppressive cruelties, to which all the daughters of
Israel would have been exposed had he been triumphant; and a mother in
Israel might well exult in a deliverance from one whose desolating track