Song of Solomon 3:5

5. I charge you, O ye daughters With this verse ends the rehearsal; and so sweet was this last interview, over which memory fondly broods with miser care, that she urges the hearers to do nothing to divert her affections unless, in some possible juncture. they of themselves seek another object. See Song of Solomon 2:7. In all this rehearsal the leading emotions are so delicately and faithfully traced and sustained by given incidents, while so much is skilfully left to the imagination to supply, that, by the rules of rhetoric which we apply to Theocritus or Catullus, to Moore or Burns, it must take rank as a master-piece of soft and brilliant poetry. No wonder that under its infinite suggestion it has furnished material for allegory, often true and tender, applicable to much of Christian experience, to many a phase of both the Church of Israel and the Church of Christ. And this it does all the more solidly for having itself been real, if not literal, at first. That is to say, it was a dramatic truth if not a historic truth.