Before the face of the Lord,
The glow of His wrath.
[For thus hath the Lord said, 27
All the land shall be waste
Yet full end I make not][215]
For this let the Earth lament, 28
And black be Heaven above!
I have spoken and will not relent,
Purposed and turn not from it.[216]
4. The Fourth Scythian Song follows immediately, also without introduction. The first four couplets vividly describe the flight of the peasantry, [pg 117] actual or imagined, before the invaders. The rest seems addressed to the City as though being threatened she sought to reduce her foes with a woman's wiles, only to find that it was not her love but her life they were after, and so expired at their hands in despair. All this is more suitable to the Chaldean than to the Scythian invasion, and may be one of the Prophet's additions in 604 to his earlier Oracles. However we take it, the figure is of Jeremiah's boldest and most vivid. The irony is keen.