Jehovah, under whom she shall be glorified with a perpetual salvation, and her dominion extended over all the earth. To limit the prophet's vision to the deliverance from Babylon would be to make him a messenger of glad tidings which mocked the hopes of the covenant people; for this deliverance did not fulfil the just expectations which his lofty promises awakened in the bosoms of the pious remnant of Israel. No; it is in Christ's redemption alone, of which that of Cyrus was only a shadow, that Zion receives in full measure the glorious promises which shine forth in this part of Isaiah. If now we consider the _form_ of these promises, we find that they bear throughout the stamp of true prophecy, as distinguished from history. They have neither the dress of prose history, with its dates and circumstantial details, such as we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, nor of historic poetry, like the song of Deborah and Barak; like the seventy-eighth hundred and fifth, and hundred and sixth psalms. They are expressed in a series of poetic images, in which, with the exception of the name of Cyrus, all is general; images, moreover, drawn for the most part, not from the great events connected with the conquests of Cyrus, but from the earlier history of Israel. Let any one read, for example, the forty-sixth and forty-seventh chapters of Isaiah, and ask himself whether a writer who lived in Cyrus' day could have described the fall of Babylon without specific allusions to the agencies by which it was brought to pass. As to the _historic references_ which some find to the march of the Jewish caravans of returning captives through the desert that lay between Babylon and Palestine, whoever reads the passages in question without a previously formed conclusion, must be satisfied that they are _poetic descriptions_ of the redemption and restoration of God's people borrowed mainly from the primitive journey of Israel from Egypt to Canaan through the wilderness of Arabia. God, as then, goes before his people, opening for them in their extremity "rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys;" making "the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water." Even Cyrus is mentioned not as the king of Persia, but as a man raised up from the east to execute God's vengeance on the oppressors of his people.