rs--" and Job turns his
pale face, and fairly shrieks, "My sons and daughters--what? Say on!"
"Thy sons and daughters were feasting--and--the storm swept
through--the--sky, and crushed the house--and slew--thy
daughters--and--thy--sons--and I, a servant, I only, am
escaped--alone--to tell thee;" and Job wept aloud, and his grief
possesses him, as a storm the sea--and was very pitiful--and he fell on
his face, and worshiped! The apocalypse of this catastrophe is genius
of the most splendid order. Tragedy has come! But Job rises above
tragedy, for he worshiped.

In his "Talks on the Study of Literature," Arlo Bates, in discussing
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg oration, instancing this sentence, "We
here highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain," says,
"The phrase is one of the most superb in American literature, and what
makes it so is the word 'highly,' the adverb being the last of which an
ordinary mind would have thought in this connection, and yet, once
spoken, it is the inevitable and superb word." To all this I agree
with eagerness; but submit that, in this phrase from Job, "I only am
escaped _alone_ to tell thee," the word "alone" is as magical and
wonderful; and I think the author of this drama may well be claimed as
poet laureate of that far-off, dateless time.

And the good man's goodness availed him nothing? What are we to think
of Job now? Either a good man is afflicted, and perhaps of God, or Job
has been a cunning fraud, his life one long hypocrisy, his age a gray
deception. Which? Here lies the strategic quality in the drama. The
three friends are firmly persuaded that Job is unrighteous and his sin
has found him out. His dissimulation, though it has deceived man, has
not deceived God. Such their pitiless reasoning; and the more blind
they are, the more they argue, as is usual; for in argument, men
convince themselves, though they make no other converts. In Job's
calamity, all winds blow against him, as with one rowing shoreward on
the sea, when tides draw out toward the deep and winds blow a gale off
shore out to the night; and they blow against Job, because he is not
what he once was. His life, once comedy, glad or wild with laughter
according to the day, is now tragedy, with white face and bleeding
wounds, and voice a moan, like autumn winds. Alas! great prince, thy
tragedy is come! Tragedy; but God did not commission it. This drama
does not misrepresent God, as many a