PREFACE To name the Book of Job "The Poet's Charter" may seem to some a presumption; to me it is in the nature of a reverence. Many years ago I was brought by accident to the study of that profound Poem, and the more I became immersed in it, the more amazed I was at its power and its beauty. I made an analysis of the argument, and "the hollow truisms, the unsufficing halftruths, the false assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots" (namely, Job's Friends), and "the impressive facts, the piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful reasonof Job himself, gradually wove ing " 1 1 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, by S. T. Coleridge, pp. 36-37. themselves into a coherence, which in its turn gave rise to a poem. This poem I called An Essay in a Brief Model, because Milton called the Book of Job "a brief model" of the epic form of poetry, in his Reason of Church Government. Even with the aid of this title, however, few of my readers understood that my poem was an attempt to express the inward meaning of the Book of Job in heroic verse; whence I drew the eonclusion, not that my poem was obscure, but that my readers were very imperfectly, if at all, acquainted with Job and his sorrows; because, whatever verbal difficulties might here and there impede the casual peruser, the general drift of my poem was in plain accordance with its subject. Therefore I determined to study that marvellous work over again, with all the extraneous assistance that was in my power to use, in order to make trial in prose of what I had failed to do in poetry, and something more besides; that is to say, to exhibit to my countrymen the priceless treasure, |