Sustained in helpless infancy, whom oh
That he had ne'er begotten! Thou descend'st
To Pluto's subterraneous dwelling drear,
Leaving myself destitute, and thy boy,
Fruit of our hapless loves, an infant yet,
Never to be hereafter thy delight,

Nor love of thine to share, or kindness more;
For should he safe survive this cruel war,
With the Achaians, penury and toil
Must be his lot, since strangers will remove
At will his landmarks, and possess his fields.
Thee lost, he loses all-of father, both,
And equal playmate in one day deprived.
To sad looks doomed, and never-ceasing tears,
He seeks, necessitous, his father's friends;
One by his mantle pulls, one by his vest,
Whose utmost pity yields to his parched lips
A thirst-provoking drop, and grudges more.
Some happier child, as yet untaught to mourn
A parent's loss, shoves rudely from the board
My son, and, smiting him, reproachful cries—
'Away-thy father is no guest of ours.'
Then, weeping, to his widowed mother comes
Astyanax, who on his father's lap

Ate marrow only, once, and fat of lambs;
And when sleep took him, and his crying fit
Had ceased, slept ever on the softest bed,
Warm in his nurse's arms, fed to his fill
With delicacies, and his heart at rest.
But now Astyanax (so named in Troy

For thy sake, guardian of her gates and towers),
His father lost, must many a pang endure.
And as for thee, cast naked forth among
Yon galleys, where no parent's eye of thine

Shall find thee, when the dogs have torn thee once
Till they are sated, worms shall eat thee next.
Meantime thy graceful raiment rich, prepared
By our own maidens, in thy palace lies;
But I will burn it, burn it all, because
Useless to thee, who never, so adorned,
Shalt slumber more; yet every eye in Troy
Shall see how glorious once was thy attire.'

Fourth Week-Fifth Day.

'DESOLATE PLACES.'-JOB III. 13, 14.

In the latter part of his discourse, Job, amid the torture of his afflictions, dwells upon ideas of rest-of that rest and immunity from all pain, which he would at this time have possessed, had he died in the early morning of his existence. This is, of course, a low idea of rest; a rest not consciously enjoyed, and on which no conscious refreshment follows; a rest consisting in the mere negation of existence. Job's expressions provoke the inquiry-What were his notions of death? But we shall not enter into this question now; nor, perhaps, is it right to press his words too strictly, inasmuch as similar views with respect to death are expressed in the popular language of all religions and nations. Indeed, it might be a curious speculation to inquire, how little popular expressions are to be taken as embodying the substantial views of those who employ them.

Among other things, Job indulges in the idea that had he then died, he would now have been at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, who built desolate places for themselves.' What does he mean by desolate places? The meaning is doubtful. The term in Hebrew is desolations or destructions, and comes from a root that signifies to dry up; because dry or barren plains, or rocky and sandy mountains, are desolate places, unfit for the support of man or beast. Some conceive that Job means forests or parks, places which kings and great men frequently keep up in good order for their exercise and amusement. Others think that these 'desolations' must indicate houses erected in solitary groves; for princes and nobles are often desirous of such secluded retreats, where they may pass their time at ease, disburdened of their state, and relieved from the press of attendants and visitors. But this does not satisfy others, who take the meaning to be, that the great ones of the earth, in order to perpetuate and immortalize their names,

erect for themselves stately structures, at an immense cost, upon such places as are decayed and gone to ruin.

But all these explanations seem to want point and application to the idea on which the mind of Job is expatiating. There is no conceivable reason why any of these matters should be produced, more than any other act which princes might execute. We, therefore, greatly prefer that interpretation which has a clear bearing and signification, taken with the context. This is, that these 'desolate places' signify the magnificent tombs and sepulchres which the great are wont to build for the reception of themselves and their families, and which it was very much the custom of ancient times to prepare during one's lifetime; a custom which we see reviving in our own public cemeteries, some of the most costly tombs in which, at least in the cemeteries near London, were prepared during their lives by the persons who expected to occupy them. These might be called desolate, as being, in general, solitarily apart from towns, or as being destined for the habitation only of the dead. Or we might lay stress upon the signification 'destructions,' and say that it does not materially differ from the term sarcophagi, 'flesh-consumers,' which the Greeks applied to their tombs. The idea would then be, that these were places where the bodies of the dead were consumed or destroyed by mouldering into dust.

That the magnificence of sepulchral isolation is of extreme antiquity, and might well and naturally furnish this allusion to Job, is well known. There are even existing monuments to attest it. So much have men in all ages cared for the preservation of their remains, or for the perpetuation of their names, that among all the monuments of their pride, their tombs are the most enduring, whether reared above the ground or cut out of the rocks. Temples which seemed built for eternity have disappeared or are in ruins, while tombs of far earlier date. remain in complete preservation; and of all the noble fabrics. which the kings and great ones of the earth have in remote ages built for their living habitations, there are none, of which any trace remains above ground, that come within upwards of a

VOL. V.

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thousand years of the earliest existing tombs. The palaces of Nineveh even, are assuredly of very far later date than the pyramidal and excavated tombs of Egypt; and whatever their date be, they owe their preservation, not to the strength or skill of their construction, but to the accident of their being buried beneath the ground; while there are sepulchral monuments which have stood apart in the waste, confronting the sun for the space of nearly forty centuries, and which are still so far from decay that they are likely to stand as long as the world endures. The great ones of the world know that there will be always living men to rear up temples and palaces for their own day and generation; but they also know that the future will not

care so greatly for the remote past as to bestow enduring and costly monuments upon it; and not trusting, therefore, to its care the task of monumentally eternizing the memory of their greatness, they strive in their lifetime 'to build their desolate places for themselves.' But, alas for them! stones may last far longer than their names; and even the dried and drugged carcass may be preserved far beyond the time in which, great as they were in their day, and high as the place they took among the desclaters and masters of the earth, even the faintest trace of their name and memory has perished. There is the Mausoleum. Who reared it? Whose mortal part was it destined for? On whose memory was it destined to bestow an earthly

immortality? No one can answer.

No one knows; and, un

less as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, no one cares.

It may be, however, that the emphasis in the phrase, 'built desolate places for themselves,' which we have construed to mean in their own lifetime and by their personal care, may rather lie in the complete isolation and seclusion from the rest of the world which the great ones of the earth affected. That this is involved in the idea we have no doubt, when we recollect the great solicitude evinced by high families, even in Scripture, and so early as the time of Abraham, to have a sepulchre apart, which none but themselves and theirs might use. In connection with this subject, and with the apparent date of the Book of Job, it is interesting to recollect that the very tomb-the sepulchral cavern which Abraham bought of Ephron the Hittite for a family sepulchre-the very tomb to which Jacob enjoined his sons to carry his remains, and of which he said, 'There they buried Abraham, and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah'—is to this day known and honoured as theirs.

It was the master feeling of the Hebrew to desire to lie in the same tomb with his family, but apart from the rest of the world. To be 'gathered to his fathers' in the tomb, was with him almost a passion. Even in the open cemeteries (for all could not have rock sepulchres) this exclusive family gathering was, so far as possible, accomplished. This is still the case in the East, where separate families have often portions walled in like a garden, in which the bones of their ancestors have remained undisturbed for many generations; for in these enclosures the graves are all distinct and apart, each of them having a stone placed upright both at the head and feet, inscribed with the name and title of the deceased.

But in Egypt and some other countries, even this degree of isolation could not satisfy the pride of kings. They must be wholly alone and single. In Persia there are regal sepulchres singly apart from all others, cut out high up in the face of steep cliffs, inaccessible to ordinary enterprise, or unless by some such operation as swinging down from the top of the cliff.