From what has been said it is clear that we must not seek too high for Jeremiah’s rank as a poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome some recent writers—is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was reared—sometimes of an exquisite exactness of tone and delicacy of feeling, but sometimes full both of what are metrical irregularities according to modern standards, and of coarse images and similes. To reduce the metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm’s, may occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the house-mill, the wine skins, the ornaments of women, the yoke, the plough, and so forth. And there are abrupt changes of metaphor as in our early ballads, due to the rush of a quick imagination and the crowd of concrete figures it catches. Some of Jeremiah’s verse indeed shows no irregularity. The following, for instance, which recalls as Hosea loved to do the innocence and loyalty of Israel’s desert days, is in the normal Qînah rhythm of lines with alternately _three_ and _two_ accents each. The two first lines are rhymed, the rest not. II. 2f.:— The troth of thy youth I remember, Thy love as a bride, Thy follow of Me through the desert, The land unsown. Holy to the Lord was Israel, Of His income the firstling, All that would eat it stood guilty, Evil came on them. Or II. 32:— Can a maiden forget her adorning, Or her girdle the bride? Yet Me have My people forgotten, Days without number. How fine hast thou fashioned thy ways, To seek after love! Thus ’t was thyself(55) to [those] evils Didst train(56) thy ways. Yea on thy skirts is found blood Of innocent(57) souls. Not only on felons(?) I find it,(58) But over all these. Here again is a passage which, with slight emendations and these not arbitrary, yields a fair constancy of metre (IV. 29-31):—