Sir William Jones, in his essay on the mystical poetry of Persia and India, called attention to the sensuous images in which Oriental religious poetry expresses itself. This connection will surprise no one who has discovered from the history of religion that women and wine formed important features in ancient worship. The readiness with which ungratified sexual passion runs into religious emotion has frequently been marked by physicians, and finds much corroboration in the devotional works of monks and nuns. But the Song of Songs has nothing religious about it. Even the personages are not religious, as in the Hindu erotic _Gita Govinda_, by Jayadeva, which tells of the loves of Badha and the god Krishna in the guise of a shepherd. Christ and his Church only appear in the headings given to the chapters. Though to be classed among erotic poems, the Song of Songs cannot fairly be called immoral or obscene. The character of the interlocutors and the division of the scenes is a little uncertain. It is, for instance, dubious whether the first speaker is Solomon or the Shulamite. If we take the version of M. Réville, the piece opens with the yearnings of the heroine, whom "the king hath brought into his chambers," for her absent lover. "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine." She is black but comely; swarthy, because having to tend the vineyards she has been scorched by the sun. She is a Shulammite, or native of Shulam, now Solma, near Carmel--a part renowned for the beauty of its women. It was Abishag, a Shulamite, who was chosen when they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel to warm the bed of old King David. Solomon had seen the fair maid of Shulam, and, when she went down into the garden of nuts "to see the green plants of the valley," or ever she was aware, she was abducted. In vain, however, does the monarch offer her the best place in his harem. Amid the glories of the court she sighs for the shepherd lover from whom she is separated. She tells how early one spring morning her beloved engaged her to go out with him. "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land and now, although she seeks and finds him not," she declares "my beloved is mine and I am his." Her constant burden to her harem companions is, "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up nor awaken love until it please."* Love must be spontaneous, she declares, and she refuses to yield to the wishes of the libidinous monarch. When Solomon praises her she replies with praises of her beloved peasant swain. She longs for him by day and seeks him in dreams by night. Solomon offers to place her above his "threescore queens and fourscore concubines and virgins without number"; but she is home-sick, and prefers the embraces of her