I have compared thee, O my love, To a team of horses, in Pharaoh's chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of pearls, Thy neck with chains of gold. The last couplet refers to the ornaments of the horse's bridle and neck. Now, to the Hebrew the horse was almost invariably associated with war. The Shulammite is elsewhere (vi. 4) termed "terrible as an army with banners." In Theocritus the comparison is primarily to Helen's beauty; in Canticles to the Shulammite's awesomeness, Turn away thine eyes from me, For they have made me afraid. These foregoing points of resemblance are the most significant that have been adduced. And they are not only seen to be each unimportant and inconclusive, but they have no cumulative effect. Taken as wholes, as was said above, the Idylls and Canticles are the poles asunder in their moral attitude towards love and in their general literary treatment of the theme. Of course, poets describing the spring will always speak of the birds; Greek and Hebrew loved flowers, Jew and Egyptian heard the turtle-dove as a harbinger of nature's rebirth; sun and moon are everywhere types of warm and tender feelings; love is the converter of a winter of discontent into a glorious summer. In all love poems the wooer would fain embrace the wooed. And if she prove coy, he will tell of the menial parts he would be ready to perform, to continue unrebuked in her vicinity. Anacreon's lover (xx) would be water in which the maid should bathe, and the Egyptian sighs, "Were I but the washer of her clothes, I should breathe the scent of her." Or the Egyptian will cry, "O were I the ring on her finger, that I might be ever with her," just as the Shulammite bids her beloved (though in another sense) "Place me as a seal on thine hand" (Cant. viii. 6). Love intoxicates like wine; the maiden has a honeyed tongue; her forehead and neck are like ivory. Nothing in all this goes beyond the identity of feeling that lies behind all poetical expression. But even in this realm of metaphor and image and symbolism, the North-Semitic _wasf_ and even more the Hebraic parallels given in other parts of the Bible are closer far. Hosea xiv. 6-9 (with its lilies, its figure of Israel growing in beauty as the olive tree, "and his smell as Lebanon"), Proverbs (with its eulogy of faithful wedded love, its lips dropping honeycomb, its picture of a bed perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon, the wife to love whom is to drink water from one's own well, and she the pleasant roe and loving hind)--these and the royal Epithalamium (Ps. xlv), and other Biblical passages too numerous to quote, constitute the real parallels to the imagery and idealism of Canticles.