The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

AS
CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF THE POEMS
we pass out of Jerusalem by the Damascus Gate,
and follow the main north road, our attention
is immediately arrested by a low hill of grey rock
sprinkled with wild flowers, which is now attracting
peculiar notice because it has been recently identified
with the " Golgotha " on which our Lord was crucified.
In the face of this hill a dark recess—faintly suggestive
of the eye-socket, if we may suppose the title
'* Place
of a skull " to have arisen from a fancied resemblance
to a goat's skull—is popularly known as "Jeremiah's
grotto," and held by current tradition to be the retreat
where the prophet composed the five elegies that con-
stitute our Book of Lamentations. Clambering with
difficulty over the loose stones that mark the passage
of v/inter torrents, and reaching the floor of the cave,
we are at once struck by the suspicious aptness of the
** sacred site." In a solitude singularly retired, con-
sidering the proximity of a great centre of population,
the spectator commands a full view of the whole city,
its embattled walls immediately confronting him, with
clustered roofs and domes in the rear. What place
could have been more suitable for a poetic lament over
the ruins of fallen Jerusalem ? Moreover, when we
take into account the dread associations derived from
the later history of the Crucifixion, v/hat could be
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