ights of fellowship with God make him insensible to external
privations, are drink for him thirsty, food for his hunger, a home in
his wanderings, a source of joy and music in the midst of much that is
depressing: "My mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips." The little
camp had to keep keen look-out for nightly attacks; and it is a slight
link of connection, very natural under the circumstances, between the
psalms of this period, that they all have some references to the
perilous hours of darkness. We have found him laying himself down to
sleep in peace; here he wakes, not to guard from hostile surprises, but
in the silence there below the stars to think of God and feel again the
fulness of His all-sufficiency. Happy thoughts, not fears, hold his eyes
waking. "I remember Thee upon my bed."

The fruition heartens for renewed exercise of confidence, in which
David feels himself upheld by God, and foresees his enemies' defeat and
his own triumph. "My soul cleaveth after Thee"--a remarkable phrase, in
which the two metaphors of tenacious adherence and eager following are
mingled to express the two "phases of faith," which are really one--of
union with and quest after God, the possession which pursues, the
pursuit which possesses Him who is at once grasped and felt after by the
finite creature whose straitest narrowness is not too narrow to be
blessed by some indwelling of God, but whose widest expansion of
capacity and desire can but contain a fragment of His fulness. From such
elevation of high communion he looks down and onward into the dim
future, his enemies sunken, like Korah and his rebels, into the gaping
earth, or scattered in fight, and the jackals that were snuffing
hungrily about his camp in the wilderness gorging themselves on corpses,
while he himself, once more "king," shall rejoice in God, and with his
faithful companions, whose lips and hearts were true to God and His
anointed, shall glory in the deliverance that by the arbitrament of
victory has flung back the slanders of the rebels in their teeth, and
choked them with their own lies.

Our space forbids more than a brief reference to psalm lxii., which
seems also to belong to this time. It has several points of contact with
those already considered, _e.g._, the phrase, "sons of men," in the
sense of "nobles" (ver. 9); "my soul," as equivalent to "myself," and
yet as a kind of quasi-separate personality which he can study and
exhort; the significant use o