Like his fellow-prophets, whose moral atmosphere was as burning as their physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright sun _drew breath_ (as Isaiah puts it) _in the fear of the Lord_ and saw the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human as well as animal, which their skirts leave behind are rendered with vividness, poignancy and horror of detail. Take, to begin with, the following, XIV. 1 ff.:— _The Word of the Lord to Jeremiah Concerning the Drought._ Jerusalem’s cry is gone up, Judah is mourning, The gates thereof faint in Black grief to the ground. Her nobles sent their menials for water, They came to the pits; Water found none and returned, Empty their vessels. [Abashed and confounded They cover their heads.](76) The tillers(77) of the ground are dismayed, For no rain hath been(78); And abashed are the ploughmen, They cover their heads. The hind on the moor calves and abandons, For the grass has not come. On the bare heights stand the wild asses, Gasping for air With glazen eyes— Herb there is none! Though our 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)