Till their soul becomes as a garden well-watered,
Nor again any more shall they pine.
Then rejoice in the dance shall the maidens, 13
The youths and the old make merry.[643]
When their mourning I turn to mirth[644]
And give them joy from their sorrow.
When I richly water the soul of the priests,[645] 14
And My folk with My bounty are filled—
Rede of the Lord.]
The next poems no one denies to Jeremiah; they are among the finest we have from him. And how natural that he should conceive and utter them in those quiet days when he was at, or near, Ramah, the grave of the mother of the people.[646] He hears her century-long travail of mourning for the loss of the tribes that were sprung from her Joseph, aggravated now by the banishment of her Benjamin; but hears too the promise that her travail shall be rewarded by their return. The childless old [pg 303] man has the soul of mother and father both—now weeping with the comfortless Rachel and now, in human touches unmatched outside the Parable of the Prodigal, reading into the heart of God the same instinctive affections, to which, in spite of himself, every earthly father is stirred by the mere mention of the name of a rebellious and wandered son. The most vivid details are these: after I had been brought to know, which might also be translated after I had been made to know myself and so anticipate when he came to himself of our Lord's Parable; I smote on my thigh, the gesture of despair; and in 20a the very human attribution to the Deity of surprise that the mere name of Ephraim should move Him to affection, which recalls both in form and substance the similar question attributed to the Lord in XII. 9.