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The king who had been the shepherd-boy, and had been taken from the quiet sheep-cotes to rule over Israel, sings this little psalm of Him who is the true Shepherd and King of men. We do not know at what period of David's life it was written, but it sounds as if it were the work of his later years.
"And Joachim was more and more sorrowful; and he would not be seen by his wife, but avoided her, and went away into the pastures where were the shepherds and the sheep-cotes. And he built himself a hut, and fasted forty days and forty nights; for he said 'Until the Lord God look upon me mercifully, prayer shall be my meat and my drink.
Even on winter nights, when the eagle's wings clanged among the peaks, and he heard the long howl of wolves about the sheep-cotes in the valley, he no longer felt any fear, but thought of those sounds as representing the evil voices of the world, and hugged himself in the solitude of his cave.
Hail, meek-eyed maiden, clad in sober grey, Whose soft approach the weary woodman loves, As homeward bent to kiss his prattling babes, He jocund whistles through the twilight groves. To the deep wood the clamorous rooks repair, Light skims the swallow o'er the watery scene, And from the sheep-cotes, and fresh-furrow'd field, Stout ploughmen meet to wrestle on the green.
The country gives me PROOF and PRECEDENT Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms, Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity.
I should never have believed it possible." Then they walked on again. But in the sheds, the cow-houses, the sheep-cotes, and all round, the sensation of strength and power yet increased. Creation was there continuing; the cattle, the sheep, the fowls, the rabbits, all that dwelt and swarmed there were incessantly increasing and multiplying.
I tried to sway less heavily in the saddle, and with my eyes searched the plain at our feet. Alas! Beneath us the waste land was spread, mile upon mile: and I groaned aloud. For just below I noted a clump of roofless cabins, and beyond, upon the moors, the dotted walls of sheep-cotes, ruined also: but in all the sad-color'd leagues no living man, nor the sign of one. It was done with us.
"In ten minutes," said I, "we may be safe." To what had the summoning drums and trumpets led me? Where was the new life, then so carelessly prevented? But two days had gone, and here was I running to Joan for help, as a child to his mother. Past the peat-ricks we struggled, the sheep-cotes, the straggling fences all so familiar; cross'd the stream and rode into the yard.
Their cells were constructed like sheep-cotes, mere wattels with mouldy hay or straw between them. Their fare was of the meanest, but they gained in estimation every day.
Factories and furnaces were seen rising amidst barns and sheep-cotes, peasants were digging, and ploughs gliding amidst forges and foundries; verdant slopes and graceful clumps of trees were scattered amidst the black and ugly mouths of exhausted coal-pits; and the gentle murmur of the stream was subdued by the loud rattle of the loom.
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