50 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
ism as the case may be. On the other hand there
are other examples of what Lowth called syn-
thetic parallelism in which no term in the second
line is parallel to any term in the first, but in
which the second line consists entirely of what is
fresh and additional to the first; and in some of
these examples the two lines are not even parallel
to one another by the correspondence of similar
grammatical terms. Two such lines as these
may certainly be called synthetic, but they are
parallel to one another merely in the way that
the continuation of the same straight line is
parallel to its beginning; whereas synonymous
and antithetic parallelisms, even of the incomplete
kind, do really correspond to two separate and,
strictly speaking, parallel lines. Now, if the
term parallelism, even though it be qualified by
prefixing the adjective synthetic, be applied to
lines which, though synthetically related to one
another, are connected by no parallelism of terms
or sense, as well as to lines which are connected
by parallelism of terms or sense, then this term,
(synthetic) parallelism, will really conceal an all-
important difference under a mere semblance of
similarity. And, indeed, Lowth himself seems
to have been at least half-conscious that he was
making the term synthetic parallelism cover too
much: for he admits that “the variety in the
form of this synthetic parallelism is very great, and
the degrees of resemblance almost infinite; so that