ur sins do witness against us,
Lord act for the sake of Thy Name!
[For many have been our backslidings,
'Fore Thee have we sinned.]

Hope of Israel, His Saviour
In time of trouble,
Why be like a traveller(79) through the land,
Or wayfaring guest of a night?
Why art Thou as one that is stunned,--
Strong yet unable to save?

Yet Lord, Thou art in our midst,
[O'er us Thy Name hath been called]
Do not forsake us!

Thus saith the Lord of this people:--

So fond to wander are they,
Their feet they restrain not,
The Lord hath no pleasure in them,
He remembers their guilt.(80)

The following dirge is on either a war or a pestilence, or on both, for
they often came together. The text of the first lines is uncertain, the
Hebrew and Greek differing considerably:--

Call ye the keening women to come,
And send for the wise ones,
That they hasten and sing us a dirge,
Till with tears our eyes run down,
Our eyelids with water.

For death has come up by our windows,
And into our palaces,
Cutting off from the streets the children,
The youths from the places.
And fallen are the corpses of men
Like dung on the field,
Or sheaves left after the reaper,
And nobody gathers.(81)

The minatory discourses are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror
foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet's simplicity
does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In
the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills--night
without shelter for the weary or refuge for the hunted.

Hear and give ear, be not proud,
For the Lord hath spoken!
Give glory to the Lord your God
Before it grows dark,
And before your feet stumble--
On the mountains of dusk.
While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom
And sets it thick darkness.(82)

There this poem leaves the Doom, but in others Jeremiah leaps in a moment
from the vague and far-looming to the near and exact. He follows a line
which songs of vengeance or deliverance often take among unsophisticated
peoples in touch with nature. They will paint you a coming judgment first
in the figure of a lowering cloud or bursting storm and then in the
twinkling of an eye they turn the clouds or the lightnings into the ranks
and flashing arms of invaders arrived. I