ch--while Jeremiah himself, in
his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among
whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard,
thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had
predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron,
Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and _poor_
Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all
of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new
disasters:--

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,
For they are not.(103)

The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation's history alike swept
these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him--not
Rachel's only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops
at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul's sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in
the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through
more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of
Benjamin.

The empty, shimmering desert and the stony land thronged with such
tragedies--Jeremiah was born and brought up on the edge between them.

It was a nursery not unfit for one, who might have been (as many think),
the greatest poet of his people, had not something deeper and wider been
opened to him, with which Anathoth was also in touch. The village is not
more than an hour's walk from Jerusalem. Social conditions change little
in the East; then, as now, the traffic between village and city was daily
and close--country produce taken to the capital; pottery, salted fish,
spices, and the better cloths brought back in exchange. We see how the
history of Jerusalem may have influenced the boy. Solomon's Temple was
nearly four hundred years' old. There were the city walls, some of them
still older, the Palace and the Tombs of the Kings--perhaps also access to
the written rolls of chroniclers and prophets. Above all, Anathoth lay
within the swirl of rumour of which the capital was the centre. Jerusalem
has always been a tryst of the winds. It gathers echoes from the desert
far into Arabia, and news blown up and down the great roads between Egypt
and Damascus and beyond to the Euphrates; or when these roads are deserted
and men fear to leave their villages, news vibrating as