The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

212 THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
reflected on what this must mean at the very time
when the appetite for deHght is most keen, and the
love of freedom most intense, they would not press the
yoke with needless harshness.
But now the poet has been brought to see that it
was for his own advantage that he was made to bear
the yoke in his youth. How so ? Surely not because
it prevented him from taking too rosy views of life,
and so saved him from subsequent disappointment.
Nothing is more fatal to youth than cynicism. The
young man who professes to have discovered the
hollowness of life generally is in danger of making
his own life a hollow and wasted thing. The elegist
could never have fallen to this miserable condition,
or he would not have written as he has done here.
With faith and manly courage the yoke has the very
opposite effect. The faculty of cherishing hope in
spite of present hardships, which is the peculiar
privilege of youth, may stand a man in stead at a
later time, when it is not so easy to triumph over
circumstances, because the old buoyancy of animal
spirits, which means so much in early days, has
vanished ; and then if he can look back and see how
he has been cultivating habits of endurance through
years of discipline without his soul having been soured
by the process, he may well feel profoundly thankful
for those early experiences which were undoubtedly
very hard in their rawness.
The poet's reflections on the blessedness of quiet
waiting are followed by direct exhortations to the
behaviour which is its necessary accompaniment
for such seems to be the meaning of the next triplet,
verses 28 to 30. The Revisers have corrected this
from the indicative mood, as it stands in the Authorised
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