mentioned, but appears also in other portions of the Pyramid Texts, where it is, however, not usually so highly developed."

All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in rough, irregular lines of rhythmical prose. Read the famous _Song of the Harper_ where an epicurean life is praised; it is impassioned rhythmical prose. Take up the love poems, elegies, fairy tales and prayers of the ancient Egyptians. They have no device of metre, rhythm or rhyme. The only pattern is the parallelism. A few hymns are arranged in stanzas of ten lines with a break in the middle of each line, but no definite metrical laws existed for the lengths of lines or number of feet, so as to make a uniform rhythmical pattern of the composition.

The Egyptians wrote much of their poetry in parallelistic prose. If we do not know how they pronounced their vowels, we know enough of their literature to see that regularity of accents and equal numbers of syllables were not characteristic of their poetry.

The epic of _Gilgash_, the chief poem of the Babylonians, and the various hymns translated by Professor Langdon, are all in irregular rhythmical prose. These may be older than the poetry of the Egyptians, but in form they are a great deal alike--simply prose with a rough rhythm, frequent parallelism, but no uniform device. The lines are arranged often like free verse. "It is difficult to draw the line between their poetry and the higher style of prose," says Francis Brown. "There is a primitive freedom and lack of artificiality in the poetic movement, much greater than in the Hebrew Psalms. Metre is felt and observed at times, but then abandoned--the thought carrying itself along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division."We have seen that critics find in the hymns of the Egyptians and Babylonians the irregular rhythm and parallelisms of the Psalms, in short, impassioned rhythmical prose. Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible. W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old Testament," posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, showed that Hebrew poetry was rhythmic without possessing laws of metre, for the rhythm of thought created a naturally rhythmic prose. Rhythm is the measured rise and fall of feeling and utterance, to which the rhythm of sound is subordinate. Prosodic rules are not necessary, "for the words employed naturally group themselves in balanced members, in which the undulations of the thought are represented to the ear." When poetry becomes more artificial people do not trust to the rhythm of thought but attribute importance to metre and finally "we are apt to forget its 

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