ads, the
intense yearning of soul after God--are all repeated in these psalms.
Single metaphors and peculiar phrases which we have already met with
recur--as, for instance, "the shadow of Thy wings" (xvii. 8, lvii. 1),
and the singular phrase rendered in our version, "show Thy marvellous
loving-kindness" (xvii. 7, xxxi. 21), which is found only here. In one
of these psalms (xxxv. 13) there seems to be a reference to his earliest
days at the court, and to the depth of loving sympathy with Saul's
darkened spirit, which he learned to cherish, as he stood before him to
soothe him with the ordered harmonies of harp and voice. The words are
so definite that they appear to refer to some historic occasion:

And as for me--in their sickness my clothing was sackcloth,
With fasting I humbled my soul,
And my prayer into my own bosom returned.

So truly did he feel for him who is now his foe. The outward marks of
mourning became the natural expression of his feelings. Such is plainly
the meaning of the two former clauses, as well as of the following
verse. As the whole is a description of the outward signs of grief, it
seems better to understand the last of these three clauses as a picture
of the bent head sunk on the bosom even while he prayed,[N] than to
break the connection by referring it either to the requital of hate for
his sympathy,[O] or to the purity of his prayer, which was such that he
could desire nothing more for himself.[P] He goes on with the
enumeration of the signs of sorrow: "As if (he had been) a friend, a
brother to me, I went,"--walking slowly, like a man absorbed in sorrow:
"as one who laments a mother, in mourning garments I bowed
down,"--walking with a weary, heavy stoop, like one crushed by a
mother's death, with the garb of woe. Thus faithfully had he loved, and
truly wept for the noble ruined soul which, blinded by passion and
poisoned by lies, had turned to be his enemy. And that same love clung
by him to the last, as it ever does with great and good men, who learn
of God to suffer long and be kind, to bear all things, and hope all
things.

[N] So Ewald and Delitzsch.

[O] Hupfeld.

[P] Perowne.

Of these psalms the xxii. is remarkable. In it David's personal
experience seems to afford only the starting-point for a purely
Messianic prophecy, which embraces many particulars that far transcend
anything recorded of his sorrows. The impossibility of finding
occurrences in his life correspondin