Drunk is each ridge of thy cup drinking;
    Each clod relenteth at thy dressing; groweth soft.
  Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking,
    Fair spring sprouts forth, blest with thy blessing. 
  The fertile year is with thy bounty crowned;
  And where thou go’st, thy goings fat the ground.

  Plenty bedews the desert places;
    A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth;
  The fields with flocks have hid their faces;
    A robe of corn the valleys clotheth. 
  Deserts, and hills, and fields, and valleys all,
  Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call.

The first stanza seems to me very fine, especially the verse, “Return possessed of what they pray thee.”  The third stanza might have been written after the Spanish Philip’s Armada, but both King David and Sir Philip Sidney were dead before God brake that archer’s bow.[66] The fourth line of the next stanza is a noteworthy instance of the sense gathering to itself the sound, and is in lovely contrast with the closing line of the same stanza.

One of the most remarkable specimens I know of the play with words of which I have already spoken as common even in the serious writings of this century, is to be found in the next line:  “Where earth doth end with endless ending.”  David, regarding the world as a flat disc, speaks of the ends of the earth:  Sidney, knowing it to be a globe, uses the word of the Psalmist, but re-moulds and changes the form of it, with a power fantastic, almost capricious in its wilfulness, yet causing it to express the fact with a marvel of precision.  We see that the earth ends; we cannot reach the end we see; therefore the “earth doth end with endless ending.”  It is a case of that contradiction in the form of the words used, which brings out a truth in another plane as it were;—­a paradox in words, not in meaning, for the words can bear no meaning but the one which reveals its own reality.

The following little psalm, The Lord reigneth, is a thunderous organ-blast of praise.  The repetition of words in the beginning of the second stanza produces a remarkably fine effect.

  PSALM XCIII.

  Clothed with state, and girt with might,
    Monarch-like Jehovah reigns;
  He who earth’s foundation pight—­ pitched.
    Pight at first, and yet sustains;
    He whose stable throne disdains
  Motion’s shock and age’s flight;
    He who endless one remains
  One, the same, in changeless plight.

  Rivers—­yea, though rivers roar,
    Roaring though sea-billows rise,
  Vex the deep, and break the shore—­
    Stronger art thou, Lord of skies! 
    Firm and true thy promise lies
  Now and still as heretofore: 
    Holy worship never dies
  In thy house where we adore.

I close my selections from Sidney with one which I consider the best of all:  it is the first half of Lord, thou hast searched me.