The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

148
THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
of the facts to express his personal distress in view of
the next item, he prepares us for some rare and dread-
ful exhibition of misery ; and the tale that he has
to tell is quite enough to account for the start of
horror with which it is ushered in. The poet makes
us listen to the cry of the children. There are babies
at the breast fainting from hunger, and older children,
able to speak, but not yet able to comprehend the
helpless circumstances in which their miserable parents
are placed, calling to their mothers for food and
drink—a piercing appeal, enough to drive to the mad-
ness of grief and despair. Crying in vain for the
first necessaries of hfe, these poor children, hke the
younger infants, faint in the streets, and cast themselves
on their mothers' bosoms to die.^ This, then, is the
picture in contemplation of which the poet completely
breaks down—children swooning in sight of all the
people, and dying of hunger in their mothers' arms !
He must be recaUing scenes of the late siege. Then
the fainting little ones, as they sank down pale and ill,
resembled the wounded men who crept back from the
fight by the walls to fall and die in the streets of the
beleaguered city.
This is just the sharpest sting in the sufferings of the
children. They share the fearful fate of their seniors,
and yet they have had no part in the causes that led
to it. We are naturally perplexed as well as distressed
at this piteous spectacle of childhood. The
beauty, the simplicity, the weakness, the tenderness,
the sensitiveness, the helplessness of infancy ap-
peal to our sympathies with peculiar force. But over
and above thes'e touching considerations there is a