The progress and development of the discourse is always majestic, achieving much with few words, which, though short, are yet clear and transparent; an overflowing fulness of thought, which might readily lose itself in the vast and indefinite, but which always at the right time with tight rein collects and tempers its exuberance; to the bottom exhausting the thought and completing the utterance, and yet never too diffuse. This severe self-control is the most admirably seen in those shorter utterances which by briefly-sketched images and thoughts give us the vague apprehension of something infinite, whilst, nevertheless, they stand before us complete in themselves and clearly delineated; _e.g._, viii. 6--ix. 6, xiv. 23-32, xviii. 1-7, xxi. 11, 12; while in the long piece, xxviii.-xxxii., if the composition here and there for a moment languishes, it is only to lift itself again afresh with all the greater might. In this rich and thickly-crowded fulness of thought and word it is but seldom that the simile which is employed appears apart, to set forth and complete itself (xxxi. 4, 5); in general, it crowds into the delineation of the object which it is meant to illustrate, and is swallowed up in it,--ay, and frequently simile after simile; and yet the many threads of the discourse, which for a moment appeared ravelled together, soon disentangle themselves into perfect clearness;--a characteristic which belongs to this prophet alone, a freedom of language which with no one else so easily succeeds. The versification, in like manner, is always full, and yet strongly marked: while, however, this prophet is so little concerned about anxiously weighing out to each verse its proper number of words, not unfrequently he repeats the same word in two members (xxxi. 8, xxxii. 17, xi. 5, xix. 13), as if, with so much power and beauty in the matter within, he did not so much require a painstaking finish in the outside. The structure of the strophe is always easy and beautifully rounded.