The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

72 THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
demons just escaped from hell. To think of cultivating
art or poetry in the presence of such scenes would be
as absurd as to attempt a musical entertainment among
the shrieks of lost souls.
The case assumes another aspect when we pass from
the region of personal observation to that of reflection.
There is no beauty in the sight of a captured castle
immediately after the siege which ended in its fall, its
battlemients shattered, its walls seamed with cracks,
here and there a breach, rough and ragged, and strewn
with stones and dust. And yet, by slow degrees and
in imperceptible ways, time and nature will transform
the scene until moss-grown walls and ivy-covered
towers acquire a new beauty only seen among ruins.
Nature heals and time softens, and between them they
throw a mantle of grace over the scars of what were
once ugly, gaping wounds. Pain as it recedes into
memory is transmuted into pathos ; and pathos always
fascinates us with some approach to beauty. If it is
true that
" Poets learn in sorrow what they teach in song,"
must it not be also the fact that sorrow while in-
spiring song is itself glorified thereby ? To use suffer-
ing merely as the food of aestheticism would be to
degrade it immeasurably. We should rather put the
case the other way. Poetry saves sorrow from becoming
sordid by reveahng its beauty, and in epic
heroism even its sublimity. It helps us to perceive
hovv^ much more depth there is in life than was apparent
under the glare and glamour of prosperity. Some of us
may recollect how shallow and shadowy our own lives
were felt to be in the simple days before we had tasted
the bitter cup. There was a hunger then for some