nd form to our perplexity. How can
a good life have no visible favors? How are we to explain prosperity
coming to a man besotted with every vice and repugnant to our souls,
while beside him, with heart aromatic of good as spice-groves with
their odors, with hands clean from iniquity as those of a little child,
with eyes calm and watching for the advent of God and an opportunity to
help men,--and calamities bark at his door, like famine-crazed,
ravenous wolves at the shepherd's hut; and pestilence bears his babes
from his bosom to the grave; and calumny smirches his reputation; and
his business ventures are shipwrecked in sight of the harbor; and his
wife lies on a bed of pain, terrible as an inquisitor's rack; penury
frays his garments, and steals his home and goods, and snatches even
the crust from his table,--and God has forgotten goodness? Here is no
parable, but a picture our eyes have seen as we have stumbled from a
garret, blinded by our tears as if some wild rain dashed in our faces.

God does not care; more, God's lightnings sear the eyeballs of virtue,
tall and fair as angelhood,--this is our agonized estimate betimes, and
we are troubled lest, unwittingly and unwillingly, we malign God. To
an explanation of this fiery tangle of adversity the drama of Job sets
itself. How prodigious the task!

But the poem breathes perfume in our faces as we approach until we
think we neighbor with honeysuckle blooms. What hinders to catch the
fragrance for a moment ere we enter this room of suffering lying a step
beyond? "Job" has beauty. "Job" has bewildering beauty. This is no
hasty word, rather deliberate and sincere. An anthology from Job would
be ample material for an article. All through the poem, thoughts flash
into beauty as dewdrops on morning flowers flash into amethyst, and
ruby, and diamond, and all manner of precious stones. In reading it,
imagination is always on wing, like humming-birds above the flowers.
You may find similes that haunt you like the sound of falling water,
and breathe the breath of surest poetry in your face.

"Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark:
Let it look for light, but have none;
Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning."

"There the wicked cease from troubling,
And the weary are at rest,"--

a beautiful, thought, which Tennyson has put bodily into his "Queen of
the May," where, as here, the words sob like a child sobbing itself to
sleep whe