g but
the garment of God, the apocalypse of the heavenly. And common to them
all is also the swift transition from the outward facts which reveal
God, to the spiritual world, where His presence is, if it were possible,
yet more needful, and His operations yet mightier. And common to them
all is a certain rush of full thought and joyous power, which is again a
characteristic of youthful work, and is unlike the elegiac tenderness
and pathos of David's later hymns.

The nineteenth Psalm paints for us the glory of the heavens by day, as
the eighth by night. The former gathers up the impressions of many a
fresh morning when the solitary shepherd-boy watched the sun rising over
the mountains of Moab, which close the eastern view from the hills above
Bethlehem. The sacred silence of dawn, the deeper hush of night, have
voice for his ear. "No speech! and no words! unheard is their voice."
But yet, "in all the earth goeth forth their line,[B] and in the end of
the habitable world their sayings." The heavens and the firmament, the
linked chorus of day and night, are heralds of God's glory, with silent
speech, heard in all lands, an unremitting voice. And as he looks, there
leaps into the eastern heavens, not with the long twilight of northern
lands, the sudden splendour, the sun radiant as a bridegroom from the
bridal chamber, like some athlete impatient for the course. How the joy
of morning and its new vigour throb in the words! And then he watches
the strong runner climbing the heavens till the fierce heat beats down
into the deep cleft of the Jordan, and all the treeless southern hills,
as they slope towards the desert, lie bare and blazing beneath the
beams.

[B] Their boundary, _i.e._, their territory, or the region through which
their witness extends. Others render "their chord," or sound (LXX.
Ewald, etc.)

The sudden transition from the revelation of God in nature to His voice
in the law, has seemed to many critics unaccountable, except on the
supposition that this psalm is made up of two fragments, put together by
a later compiler; and some of them have even gone so far as to maintain
that "the feeling which saw God revealed in the law did not arise till
the time of Josiah."[C] But such a hypothesis is not required to explain
either the sudden transition or the difference in style and rhythm
between the two parts of the psalm, which unquestionably exists. The
turn from the outer world to the better light of God's wor