And the weapons of war perished!
2 Sam. i. 25-27.
Is there not the same note in David as in Milton, the same lingering on the loved name, the same reiteration of the words of sorrow?
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas?
But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Jonathan is shrined as richly and as unfadingly as Edward King or Arthur Hallam, and we may well believe that the man whom Jonathan loved as his own soul loved God from his inmost heart—that the author of the Lament was the singer of the 18th Psalm. And if it be allowed that David wrote that song—‘the Psalm of Clovis and John Wesley’[37]—it is difficult, merely on the ground of personal character, to deny him any psalm in the whole book.
I love Thee, O Lord, my strength.