Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people—worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, _sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord_. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance—wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.(740) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony! But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah’s too carried with it its denial. _My people—that I might leave my people_—this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them deeper and more yearning.