n picture, a night-piece, which, like the
former, speaks of many an hour of lonely brooding below the heavens,
whether its composition fall within this early period or no. The
prophetic and doctrinal value of the psalms is not our main subject in
the present volume, so that we have to touch but very lightly on this
grand hymn. What does it show us of the singer? We see him, like other
shepherds on the same hills, long after "keeping watch over his flocks
by night," and overwhelmed by all the magnificence of an eastern sky,
with its lambent lights. So bright, so changeless, so far,--how great
they are, how small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are they gods,
as all but his own nation believed? No,--"the work of Thy fingers,"
"which Thou hast ordained." The consciousness of God as their Maker
delivers from the temptation of confounding bigness with greatness, and
wakes into new energy that awful sense of personality which towers above
all the stars. He is a babe and suckling--is that a trace of the early
composition of the psalm?--still he knows that out of his lips, already
beginning to break into song, and out of the lips of his fellows, God
perfects praise. There speaks the sweet singer of Israel, prizing as the
greatest of God's gifts his growing faculty, and counting his God-given
words as nobler than the voice of "night unto night." God's fingers made
these, but God's own breath is in him. God ordained them, but God visits
him. The description of man's dignity and dominion indicates how
familiar David was with the story in Genesis. It may perhaps also,
besides all the large prophetic truths which it contains, have some
special reference to his own earlier experience. It is at least worth
noting that he speaks of the dignity of man as kingly, like that which
was dawning on himself, and that the picture has no shadows either of
sorrow or of sin,--a fact which may point to his younger days, when
lofty thoughts of the greatness of the soul are ever natural and when in
his case the afflictions and crimes that make their presence felt in
all his later works had not fallen upon him. Perhaps, too, it may not be
altogether fanciful to suppose that we may see the shepherd-boy
surrounded by his flocks, and the wild creatures that prowled about the
fold, and the birds asleep in their coverts beneath the moonlight, in
his enumeration of the subjects of his first and happiest kingdom, where
he ruled far away from men and sorrow