O lovely thing
To sing and praises frame
To thee, O Lord, and thy high name;
With early spring
Thy bounty to display,
Thy truth when night hath vanquished day:
Yea so to sing,
That ten-stringed instrument
With lute, and harp, and voice consent.
For, Lord, my mind [10]
Thy works with wonder fill;
Thy doings are my comfort still.
What wit can find,
How bravely thou hast wrought,
Or deeply sound thy shallow’st thought?
The fool is blind,
And blindly doth not know,
How like the grass the wicked grow.
The wicked grow
Like frail though flow’ry grass; [20]
And fall’n, to wrack past help do pass.
But thou not so,
But high thou still dost stay:
And lo thy haters fall away.
Thy haters lo,
Decay and perish all;
All wicked hands to ruin fall.
Fresh oiled I
Will lively lift my horn,
And match the matchless unicorn: [30]
Mine eye shall spy
My spies in spiteful case;
Mine ear shall hear my foes’ disgrace.
Like cedar high
And like date-bearing tree,
For green, and growth the just shall be.
Where God doth dwell
Shall be his spreading place:
God’s courts shall his fair boughs embrace.
Even then shall swell [40]
His blossoms fat and fair,
When aged rind the stock shall bear.
And I shall tell
How God my Rock is just,
So just, with him is nought unjust.