Passion and poetry, when they fire the imagination, do more than personify individual material things. By fusing the separate objects in the crucible of a common emotion which in some way appertains to them all, they personify this grand unity, and so lift their theme into the region of the sublime. Thus while in his second elegy the author of the Lamentations first dwells on the desolation of inanimate objects,--the temple, fortresses, country cottages,--these are all of interest to him only because they belong to Jerusalem, the city of his heart's devotion, and it is the city herself that moves his deepest feelings; and when in the second part of the poem he proceeds to describe the miserable condition of living persons--men, women, and children--profoundly pathetic as the picture he now paints appears to us in its piteous details, it is still regarded by its author as a whole, and the people's sufferings are so very terrible in his eyes because they are the woes of Jerusalem. Some attempt to sympathise with the large and lofty view of the elegist may be a wholesome corrective to the intense individualism of modern habits of thought. The difficulty for us is to see that this view is not merely ideal, that it represents a great, solid truth, the truth that the perfect human unit is not an individual, but a more or less extensive group of persons, mutually harmonised and organised in a common life, a society of some sort--the family, the city, the state, mankind. By bearing this in mind we shall be able to perceive that sufferings which in themselves might seem sordid and degrading can attain to something of epic dignity.