ABSTRACT
While he was out walking on a Saturday evening in July of 1876, John Ruskin was listening to the Coniston village band playing near his home in Brantwood, and his mind turned to the Psalms. The music and the location, near the “Hall” where, according to local legend, Philip and Mary Sidney had briefly lived, caused him to reflect on how much deeper the peace of the evening would have been had the band been playing, and singing, the Sidney Psalms. 1 These musings begin Ruskin’s preface to Rock Honeycomb, his 1877 selection of the Sidney Psalms. He concludes, “To those who have really known either David’s joy, distress, or desires, [the Sidney Psalms] will be enlightenment of heart and eyes, as the tasted honey on the stretched-out spear of David’s friend.” 2 Ruskin’s remarks likely surprised many of his Victorian contemporaries, since the Sidney Psalms were by then 318virtually unknown, but they would have met with a different response two or three centuries earlier, when the Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke were an acknowledged poetic masterpiece. Samuel Daniel wrote, for instance, (adapting Horace’s Ode Exegi monumentum) that the literary “monument” of the Sidney Psalms would outlast the walls of Wilton. 3 John Donne made broad, as well as personal, claims for the influence of the Sidney Psalter in his poem “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke, his sister”: Two that make one John Baptists holy voyce, And who that psalm, Now let the Iles rejoyce, Have both translated, and apply’d it too, Both told us what, and taught us how to doe. They shew us Ilanders our joy, our King, They tell us why, and teach us how to sing. 4 The example of the Sidneys confirmed to fellow poets that, as Philip Sidney put it in the Apologie, “holy Davids Psalmes are a divine Poem” and that, like David, the chief poets, “both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God.” 5 This was naturally a strong encouragement to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century religious poets like Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, George Herbert, Francis Quarles, and Henry Vaughan.
