But now, like Dante when introduced by his guide to some exceptionally agonising spectacle in the infernal regions, the poet bursts into tears, and seems to feel his very being melting away at the contemplation of the most heart-rending scene in the many mournful tableaux of the woes of Jerusalem. Breaking off from his recital of the facts to express his personal distress in view of the next item, he prepares us for some rare and dreadful exhibition of misery; and the tale that he has to tell is quite enough to account for the start of horror with which it is ushered in. The poet makes us listen to the cry of the children. There are babies at the breast fainting from hunger, and older children, able to speak, but not yet able to comprehend the helpless circumstances in which their miserable parents are placed, calling to their mothers for food and drink--a piercing appeal, enough to drive to the madness of grief and despair. Crying in vain for the first necessaries of life, these poor children, like the younger infants, faint in the streets, and cast themselves on their mothers' bosoms to die.[146] This, then, is the picture in contemplation of which the poet completely breaks down--children swooning in sight of all the people, and dying of hunger in their mothers' arms! He must be recalling scenes of the late siege. Then the fainting little ones, as they sank down pale and ill, resembled the wounded men who crept back from the fight by the walls to fall and die in the streets of the beleaguered city. [146] ii. 11, 12. This is just the sharpest sting in the sufferings of the children. They share the fearful fate of their seniors, and yet they have had no part in the causes that led to it. We are naturally perplexed as well as distressed at this piteous spectacle of childhood. The beauty, the simplicity, the weakness, the tenderness, the sensitiveness, the helplessness of infancy appeal to our sympathies with peculiar force. But over and above these touching considerations there is a mystery attaching to the whole subject of the presence of pain and sorrow in young lives that battles all reasoning. It is not only hard to understand why the bud should be blighted before it has had time to open to the sunshine: this haste in the march of misery to meet her victims on the threshold of life is to our minds a very amazing sight. And yet it is not the most perplexing part of the problem raised by the mystery of the suffering of children.