Cursed be the day, XX. 14 Whereon I was born! The day that my mother did bare me, Be it unblessed! Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15 Telling my father, “A man child is born to thee!” Making him glad. Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16 And did not relent, Let him hear a shriek in the morning, And at noon-tide alarms; That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17 So my mother had been my grave, And great for ever her womb! For what came I forth from the womb? 18 Labour and sorrow to see, That my days in shame should consume. Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are so irregular.(732) Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves. Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience, honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with God Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, naïvely betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which he must drive—painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand. So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God’s words to him. _Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed_ and _I set thee this day a fenced city and wall of bronze_.(735) For these last imply that in himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable disciple that Christ said, _Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build_.