=The Prophets.=—The names of three great prophets—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—illuminate the first page in the history of the decline of Hebrew literature. But in their writings, and notably so in those of the later minor prophets, poetry was evidently on the wane. They lived in a degenerate day. About half of the prophecy of Jeremiah, denouncing the judgment of Heaven on the disobedient people, is poetry; he lacks the pomp and majesty of Isaiah, but excels in stirring the gentler emotions. His Lamentations are beautiful elegies on the fall of his country and the desecration of the temple; every letter seems “written with a tear and every word the sound of a broken heart.” The verses of the several chapters in the original begin with consecutive letters of the alphabet, that they may be the more easily memorized, for it was intended that the sins and sufferings of the Jewish nation should never be forgotten. Can anything be more touching than the personification of Jerusalem, sitting as a solitary widow on the ground and mourning for her children? “Is this nothing to all you who pass along the way? behold and see If there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is inflicted on me; Which Jehovah inflicted on me in the day of the violence of his wrath. For these things I weep, my eyes stream with water, Because the comforter is far away that should tranquillize my soul. My children are desolate, because the enemy was strong.” Ezekiel and Daniel were carried captives to Babylon, where they made known their prophetic visions. The former wrote partly in poetry, characterized by a rough vehemence peculiar to himself. The Book of Daniel, in which history is combined with prophecy, is in prose, and a portion of it in the Aramaic language. (_Consult Keith’s “Evidence of Prophecy.”_) [Illustration: THE TOMB OF EZRA.] Another writer of distinguished merit, belonging to this age, was the scribe and priest Ezra (already mentioned), who was permitted to return from Babylon to Jerusalem with a company of his people, 458 B.C. He settled the canon of Scripture, restoring and editing the whole of the Old Testament. =The Apocrypha= (_secret writings_) consist chiefly of the stories of To’bit and Judith, the first and second books of Esdras and of the Maccabees, Ba’ruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. Composed during the three centuries immediately preceding the Christian Era, they bear internal evidence, in their lack of the ancient poetical power, of belonging to an age of literary decline. They were mostly included in the canon of Scripture by the Council of Trent in 1545, but are rejected by Protestants as uninspired. Ecclesiasticus, best of the Apocryphal books, is full of moral, political, and religious precepts, its object being to teach true wisdom and its style resembling the didactic poetry of Solomon. The following fine passage, versified by Lowth, personifies WISDOM.