fruitful dews down on it raining,That storehouse-like her lap enfoldeth
Assuréd 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.
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