He needs no converse nor companionship,
In cold starlight, whence thou can not come,
The undelivered tidings in his breast,
Will not let him rest.
He who looks down upon the immemorable throng,
And binds the ages with a song.
And through the accents of our time,
There throbs the message of eternity.

And so the unwearied God comforted the fainting strength of man.

Primarily, this glorious outburst was addrest to the exiles as heads
of families. The father's strength was broken and his children had
been crusht and ground to earth. The ancient patrimony was gone; he
had gathered his little ones in from the huts where slaves dwelt. He
was leading his little band of pilgrims into a desert. But the prophet
spoke to the exiles as to men who believed that the family was the
great national institution. With us, the family is important, but with
these Hebrew exiles the family was everything. For them the home was
the spring from whence the mighty river rolled forth. The family was
the headwaters of national, industrial, social and religious life.
Every father was revered as the architect of the family fortune. The
first ambition of every young Hebrew was to found a family. Just as
abroad, a patrician gentleman builds a baronial mansion, fills it with
art treasures, hangs the shields and portraits of his ancestors upon
the walls, hoping to hand the mansion forward to generations yet
unborn, so every worthy Hebrew longed to found a noble family. How
keen the anguish, therefore, of this exile in the desert! What a scene
is that of the exiles upon the edge of the desert. Darkness is upon