h houses of the sun delight them---
Both whence he comes, when early he awakes,
And where he goes, when evening rest he takes.

Thy eye from heaven this land beholdeth,
Such fruitful dews down on it raining,
That storehouse-like her lap enfoldeth
Assured hope of ploughman's gaining:
Thy flowing streams her drought doth temper so,
That buried seed through yielding grave doth grow.

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