Ecclesiastes 2:20

I went about to cause my heart to despair The verb for despair is not a common one. Another form of it meets us in the emphatic cry, "There is no hope" of Jeremiah 2:25; Jeremiah 18:12. What he had felt had made the seeker renounce the very impulse that led to labour. In the phrase "I went about," literally, " I turned," we have, as it were, the attitude of one who looks behind him on the road on which so far he has travelled. The retrospect was so dreary that it made the prospect drearier still.