Robert Murray
M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-
'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other - it is
but a verse - not only contains no image, but is quite
unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
childhood:
'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
has continued to haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm,
'The Lord is my shepherd':
