The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

43-S4-] GRIEVING BEFORE GOD 247
the time of endurance, when the iron is entering into
the soul. The elegist feels the degradations of his
people most keenly, and he represents them complaining
how their enemies rage at them as with open
mouths—belching forth gross insults, shouting curses,
like wild beasts ready to devour their hapless victims.^
There seems to be nothing in store for them but the
terrors of death, the pit of destruction.^
At the contemplation of this extremity of hopeless
misery the poet drops the plural number, in which
he has been personating his people, as abruptly as he
assumed it a few verses earlier, and bewails the dread
calamities in his own person.^ Then, in truly Jeremiah-
like fashion, he describes his incessant weeping for the
woes of the wretched citizens of Jerusalem and the
surrounding villages. The reference to "the daughters
of my city " * seems to be best explained as a figurative
expression for the neighbouring places, all of which it
would seem had shared in the devastation produced by
the great wave of conquest which had overwhelmed the
capital. But the previous mention of " the daughter
of my people," ^ followed as it is by this phrase about
" the daughters of my city," strikes a deeper note of
compassion. These places contained many defenceless
women, the indescribable cruelty of whose fate when
they fell into the hands of the brutal heathen soldiery
was one of the worst features of the whole ghastly
scene ; and the wretchedness of the once proud city
and its dependencies when they were completely overthrown
is finely represented so as to appeal most
effectually to our sympathy by a metaphor that pictures
them as hapless" maidens, touching us like Spenser's
' iii. 46. ^ iii. 48 fi". ^ iii. 48.
^ iii. 47.
*
iii. 51.