een upon him continually. The multitude had been laid upon
him as if he had conceived them; their tears had been his meat, night
and day, until he had felt as if God had withdrawn His favor from him,
and he had prayed that he might be slain, and not see his
wretchedness.[119] And now, at last, the command came, "Get thee up into
this mountain." The weary hands that had been so long stayed up against
the enemies of Israel, might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and
fold themselves for the shepherd's prayer--for the shepherd's slumber.
Not strange to his feet, though forty years unknown, the roughness of
the bare mountain-path, as he climbed from ledge to ledge of Abarim; not
strange to his aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain
herbage, and the broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the
silence of uninhabited ravines; scenes such as those among which, with
none, as now, beside him but God, he had led his flocks so often; and
which he had left, how painfully! taking upon him the appointed power,
to make of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the desert with
songs of deliverance. It was not to embitter the last hours of his life
that God restored to him, for a day, the beloved solitudes he had lost;
and breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and cast the
world in which he had labored and sinned far beneath his feet, in that
mist of dying blue;--all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten for
ever; the Dead Sea--a type of God's anger understood by him, of all men,
most clearly, who had seen the earth open her mouth, and the sea his
depth, to overwhelm the companies of those who contended with his
Master--laid waveless beneath him; and beyond it, the fair hills of
Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the evening
light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in their distant
fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. There, with his unabated
strength, his undimmed glance, lying down upon the utmost rocks, with
angels waiting near to contend for the spoils of his spirit, he put off
his earthly armor. We do deep reverence to his companion prophet, for
whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven; but was his death less
noble, whom his Lord Himself buried in the vales of Moab, keeping, in
the secrets of the eternal counsels, the knowledge of a sepulchre, from
which he was to be called, in the fulness of time, to talk with that
Lord, upon Hermon, of the