long, but set against God's eternal years, it shrivels to an all but imperceptible point, having position, but not magnitude. The thought of brevity naturally draws after it that of illusoriness. Just because life is so frail does it assume the appearance of being futile. Both ideas are blended in the metaphors of "a breath" and "a shadow." There is a solemn earnestness in the threefold "surely," confirming each clause of the seer's insight into earth's hollowness. How emphatically he puts it in the almost pleonastic language, "Surely nothing but a breath is every man, stand he ever so firm." The truth proclaimed is undeniably certain. It covers the whole ground of earthly life, and it includes the most prosperous and firmly established. "A breath" is the very emblem of transiency and of unsubstantiality. Every solid body can be melted and made gaseous vapour, if heat enough is applied. They who habitually bring human life "before Thee" dissolve into vapour the solid-seeming illusions which cheat others, and save their own lives from being but a breath by clearly recognising that they are. The Selah at the end of ver. 4 does not here seem to mark a logical pause in thought nor to coincide with the strophe division, but emphasises by some long-drawn, sad notes the teaching of the words. The thought runs on unbroken, and ver. 6 is closely linked to ver. 5 by the repeated "surely" and "breath" as well as in subject. The figure changes from breath to "shadow," literally "image," meaning not a sculptured likeness, but an _eidolon_, or unsubstantial apparition. "The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substantial things"; and all the movements of men coming and going in the world are but like a dance of shadows. As they are a breath, so are their aims. All their hubbub and activity is but like the bustle of ants on their hill--immense energy and toil, and nothing coming of it all. If any doubt remained as to the correctness of this judgment of the aimlessness of man's toil, one fact would confirm the psalmist's sentence, viz., that the most successful man labours to amass, and has to leave his piles for another whom he does not know, to gather into his storehouses and to scatter by his prodigality. There may be an allusion in the words to harvesting work. The sheaves are piled up, but in whose barn are they to be housed? Surely, if the grower and reaper is not the ultimate owner, his toil has been for a breath.