All patriotic songs and religious poems properly called hymns belong in the second division of lyrics; and in the Hebrew psalms devotional feeling touched here and there with a patriot’s hopes and fears, has once for all projected itself in forms of speech which seem to exhaust the capabilities of sublimity in language. These psalms were set to music, and presuppose music in their thought and their technical structure. A text most appropriate for musical rendering must be free from all subtleties of meaning and over-refinements of phraseology; it must be forcible in movement, its metaphors those that touch upon general observation, its ideas those that appeal to the common consciousness and sympathy. These qualities the psalms possess in the highest degree, and in addition they have a sublimity of thought, a magnificence of imagery, a majesty and strength of movement, that evoke the loftiest energies of a musical genius that ventures to ally itself with them. In every nation of Christendom they have been made the foundation of the musical service of the Church; and although many of the greatest masters of the harmonic art have lavished upon them the richest treasures of their invention, they have but skimmed the surface of their unfathomable suggestion. Of the manner in which the psalms were rendered in the ancient Hebrew worship we know little. The present methods of singing in the synagogues give us little help, for there is no record by which they can be traced back beyond the definite establishment of the synagogue worship. It is inferred from the structure of the Hebrew poetry, as well as unbroken usage from the beginning of the Christian era, that the psalms were chanted antiphonally or responsively. That form of verse known as parallelism—the repetition of a thought in different words, or the juxtaposition of two contrasted thoughts forming an antithesis—pervades a large amount of the Hebrew poetry, and may be called its technical principle. It is, we might say, a rhythm of thought, an assonance of feeling. This parallelism is more frequently double, sometimes triple. We find this peculiar structure as far back as the address of Lamech to his wives in Gen. iv. 23, 24, in Moses’ song after the passage of the Red Sea, in the triumphal ode of Deborah and Barak, in the greeting of the Israelitish women to Saul and David returning from the slaughter of the Philistines, in the Book of Job, in a large proportion of the rhythmical imaginative utterances of the psalmists and prophets. The Oriental Christians sang the psalms responsively; this method was passed on to Milan in the fourth century, to Rome very soon afterward, and has been perpetuated in the liturgical churches of modern Christendom. Whether, in the ancient temple service, this twofold utterance was divided between separate portions of the choir, or between a precentor and the whole singing body, there are no grounds for stating,—both methods have been employed in modern times.