Chap. iii. brings us face to face with the writer himself. In scntences brokcn, abrupt, like sharp pangs, or as a man would speak in tbe midst of a shipwreck or a battlefield, he tells us his OW11 tale of woe ; his fluctuations between despair and hope ; his cries and his prayers mixed up in wild confusion. 'I am the man who has seen the 'nicely,' he intones his song. His flesh and his bone have been made old in his sufferings (4); he has been set in dark places (6) ; laden with chains (7); and his pmyer was shut out' (S) ; Then he said in the fulness of his affliction, and of his wormwood, and of his gall : Lost is the hope and the strength in the Lord 08, 19). . . . Yet once more he rouses himself, Thus do I answer unto mine heart, and therefore do I hope again. The loving-kindness of God has not ceased, His mercies are not over altogether—they are new every morning.' . . . Let me bear it in silence ; the evil comes from Him who also sends the good. He sent punish ments—just punishments ; for we have sinned. Let us investigate our ways, and let us lift up our hands unto God in the heavens' (IS-41). . . . But verily, if we were sinning men—Thou hast not been a forgiving Gad; for Thou hast slain and hast not pitied (42, 43). Through Thee our eyes run down unceasingly, like unto rivers (48).—And in the midst of the sights around him his own suf ferings rush again upon his mind with increased power. How the dungeon closed upon him, water flowed over his head :—Buried alive. But he called upon the Lord from out his darkness, and He said, Fear not.' He has fought his fight, and freed him from the cruel hands of his adversaries and his ene mies ! (6o). Ana the milder mood into which his mind was softening down, vanishes suddenly at the vivid recollection of what they did to him, and his whole soul presses itself into onc glowing, passionate curse upon their heads. . . . Pursue them with ire, and destroy them from under the heavens of God !' . . .
Chap. iv. recommences with a sad survey, as it were, of the scene all around—the place of desolation and ruin, where the precious holy stones, together with the more precious children, lie strewed about like vile pottery (t, 2). The ghastly sights before described : the babes dying for want of food and drink ; those fed on dainties once, feeding on the refuse of the street (3-9). (` Better for them that fell through the sword than those that fell through famine'); babes stretch out their little hands for bread, and there is none to give it them ; women, pitiful women,' boiling their own children—the only food left ! The foundations of Zion are burnt. Who of all kings and peoples had ever even hoped to enter triumphantly into the gates of Jerusalem? Through the sins, the overwhelming sins. of her prophets and priests has all this come to pass (1,3). And all is over now. The king led away in fetters, the last ray of national existence gone ; and you re joice, daughter of Edom ! (21). But remember this : 'the sin of Zion is expiated.' Her cup was full to the brim, and she has emptied it to the dreg.. . . . Edorn, thy turn next ! (22). . .
A ncw and most remarkable feature is presented in this elegy. The king, the anointed of God,' under whose shadow we bad hoped to live among the peoples,' is mentioned here most emphatically. This seems to express the last stage of transactions with the Babylonians. The proposal to submit to the sovereignty, but to retain their own national ruler, subject and tributary to the conqueror, like other small satraps of his wide realm, had very likely been made at thc last inotnent, as the last possible means to avert further hostilities. That it was answered by the king's being taken prisoner and carried away, the writer does not seem to re gret so much on the king's account—of whom he says as little as possible throughout—as on that of the now utterly trodden-out nationality. Yet there is one weird comfort. Judwa has lost everything, she has emptied her cup ;' not even any more is exile to be dreaded—for there is none left to be exiled. Her sins were visited most terribly and most fully upon her ; her enemies' turn must coine now. If she has sinned, her enemy has sinned worsc. . . . Daughter of Uz, rejoice and be glad, the cup is going round, and thou shalt drink and be drunken, and thou shalt be sick.' Chap. v. (Oratio Yeremia prophet,r, Vulg.) differs from the rest considerably in tone and style. A certain collected calm, to which the horror in the midst of the catastrophe has given way, pervades it. There are no more outbursts of mad despair, no more cries for vengeance, no more heartrend ing wails for mercy ; but only a mournful enu meration of all that the nation has to undergo as the hated slave of the conqueror, interspersed with a few bricf notices of the scenes that ac companied the downfall of the crown of our head' (to-t5). All the splendour of the days of yore is now gone from Zion. There are no old men in the gates, no young men with their songs :—` Woe unto us (1.9 Nj +IN of Ao(!), we have sinned.' On the Mount of Zion, which is desolate, jackals walk about (r5-18) ; * and from Dut the midst of that vast stillness of ruin the poet's heart yearns towards God. The epilogue—half hope, half plaint—is addressed to Him who is ever lasting, beyond all earthly changes (r9). He may yet renew the days of yore (2o). Unless'—and with this shrill discord, in accordance, however, with the tenor of the entire cycle, the book concludes —'unless thou hast utterly rejected us, and art wroth against us in the extreme."' The contents of the five elegies before us are briefly this :—The desolation of the city and its mournful silence in the first ; the destruction of the city and the Temple in the second ; the individual miseries of the writer in the third ; once more the whole calamity compressed into one loud cry in the fourth ; and the sighs and the hopes of the now rejected p6Ople in the fifth. These are the sounds and images impressed upon our minds ; and through the whole goes one deep, wailing melody, which in the different chapters appears as in dif ferent, although not exactly definable, symphonic movements, over all that is lost—and all is lost.