panting, breathless hour, here is a little green glen, with a quiet
brooklet, and moist lush herb-age all along its course, and great stones
that fling a black shadow over the dewy grass at their base; and there
would the shepherd lead his flock, while the sunbeams, like swords,' are
piercing everything beyond that hidden covert. Sweet silence broods
there, The sheep feed and drink, and couch in cool lairs till he calls
them forth again. So God leads His children.

The psalm puts the rest and refreshment _first_, as being the most
marked characteristic of God's dealings. After all, it is so. The years
are years of unbroken continuity of outward blessings. The reign of
afflictions is ordinarily measured by days. 'Weeping endures for a
night.' It is a rainy climate where half the days have rain in them; and
that is an unusually troubled life of which it can with any truth be
affirmed that there has been as much darkness as sunshine in it.

But it is not mainly of outward blessings that the Psalmist is thinking.
They are precious chiefly as emblems of the better spiritual gifts; and
it is not an accommodation of his words, but is the appreciation of
their truest spirit, when we look upon them, as the instinct of devout
hearts has ever done, as expressing both God's gift of temporal mercies,
and His gift of spiritual good, of which higher gift all the lower are
meant to be significant and symbolic. Thus regarded, the image describes
the sweet rest of the soul in communion with God, in whom alone the
hungry heart finds food that satisfies, and from whom alone the thirsty
soul drinks draughts deep and limpid enough.

This rest and refreshment has for its consequence the restoration of the
soul, which includes in it both the invigoration of the natural life by
the outward sort of these blessings, and the quickening and restoration