The second subdivision of this part (vv. 12, 13) reiterates the former with some difference of tone. There is a beautiful climax of earnestness in the psalmist's appeal to God. His prayer swells into crying, and that again melts into tears, which go straight to the great Father's heart. Weeping eyes are never turned to heaven in vain; the gates of mercy open wide when the hot drops touch them. But his fervour of desire is not this suppliant's chief argument with God. His meditation has won for him deeper insight into that transiency which at first he had only laid like ice on his heart, to cool its feverish heat. He sees now more clearly, by reason of his effort to turn away his hope from earth and fix it on God, that his brief life has an aspect in which its brevity is not only calming, but exalting, and gives him a claim on God, whose guest he is while here, and with whom he has guest-rights, whether his stay is longer or shorter. "The land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Lev. xxv. 23). That which was true in a special way of Israel's tenure of the soil is true for the individual, and true for ever. All men are God's guests; and if we betake ourselves behind the curtains of His tent, we have rights of shelter and sustenance. All the bitterness of the thought of the brevity of life is sucked out of it by such a confidence. If a man dwells with God, his Host will care for the needs, and not be indifferent to the tears, of His guest. The long generations which have come and gone like shadows are not a melancholy procession out of nothing through vanity into nothing again, nor "disquieted in vain," if they are conceived as each in turn lodging for a little while in that same ancestral home which the present generation inhabits. It has seen many sons succeeding their fathers as its tenants, but its stately strength grows not old, and its gates are open to-day as they have been in all generations.