dire shame shall they be
When they fail to succeed.
Be their confusion eternal,
Nor ever forgotten!
O Lord,(729) Who triest the righteous, 12
Who lookest to the reins and the heart,
Let me see Thy vengeance upon them,
For to Thee I have opened my cause.(730)

Cursed be the day, XX. 14
Whereon I was born!
The day that my mother did bare me,
Be it unblessed!
Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15
Telling my father,
"A man child is born to thee!"
Making him glad.
Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16
And did not relent,
Let him hear a shriek in the morning,
And at noon-tide alarms;
That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17
So my mother had been my grave,
And great for ever her womb!
For what came I forth from the womb? 18
Labour and sorrow to see,
That my days in shame should consume.

Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are
so irregular.(732)

Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some
fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were
neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves.
Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity
for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from
his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience,
honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with God
Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, naively betrayed by
his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate.
For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his
predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all
its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a
soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have
been his weakness as a man--may have made him, from a human point of view,
an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which
he must drive--painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others
rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand.

So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God's words to
him. _Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed_ and _I set thee this day
a fenced city and wall of bronze_.(7