aken the
crown from my head. His troops come together, and raise up their way
against me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. My kinsfolk have
failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell in
mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in
their sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer. My breath
is strange to my wife, though I entreated for my children's sake of
mine own body. Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they
spake against me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I
loved are turned against me. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my
flesh. Have pity upon me! Why do ye persecute me as God? Have pity
upon me!" If in literature there is a more passionate passage to
incarnate in words a life wholly bereft and utterly alone, I know not
of it. Oedipus Coloneus had Antigone, and King Lear had the king's
fool and loyal Kent, and Prometheus had visitors betimes, who brought
him balm of sympathy; but Job's servants will not obey him, and little
children make sport of him, and his wife turns away from him, and will
not hear his sobbing words, nor hear him as he calls the names of their
children whom he loved. Tragic Job! Not Samson, blind and jeered at
by the Philistine populace in Dagon's temple, is sadder to look upon
than Job, Prince of Uz, in the solitude of his bereavement. This old
dramatist, as I take it, had himself known some unutterable grief, and
out of the wealth of his melancholy recollections has poured tears like
rain. He has no master in pathos.

This lament of Job is one aspect, and but one; for as he rises toward
God, his calamities seem slipping away from him as night's shadows from
the hills at dawn. God knows his case, and Job, conscious of his
integrity, looks God in the face, and his voice lifts into triumph,
passing out of complaint and bemoaning into sublime utterances, which
constitute the sublimest oration man ever pronounced, and is contained
in those parts of the poem reaching from chapter xxvi to chapter xxxi,
inclusive. I have read this oration, recalling the occasion which
produced it, and noted the movement of this aged orator's spirit, and
have compared it with Marc Antony's funeral oration over Caesar, given,
by common consent, the chiefest place among orations in the English
tongue. For that noble utterance my admiration is intense and glowing.
I answer to it as waters to the touch of violent