More than... — This number of infants, 120,000, according to the usual reckoning, gives a population of 600,000.
And also much cattle. — This, which at first reads like an anti-climax, is really, perhaps, the most striking thing in the whole of this marvellous book. Already the idea that a sympathy could exist between Jonah and the gourd has seemed to anticipate by thousands of years the feeling of modern poetry expressed in the lines,
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears;”
and now the final touch, laying especial emphasis on the thought that even the cattle are an interest and care to God, seems at once to leap to the truth which even our own age has been slow to learn.
“He prayeth best who loveth best,
All creatures great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”