After mentioning several instances, he went on: “And there is the shepherd psalm: I find that it is taken among you as having two parts, the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second turning to the figure of a banquet with the host and the guest.”
“Oh, we have talked about that,” said my lady of the teacups as she dangled the tea-ball with a connoisseur’s fondness, “and we have even said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been finished in the one figure of shepherd life.”
“It seems to us,” I added, wishing to give suitable support to my lady’s rather brave declaration of our sense of a literary flaw in the matchless psalm, “it seems to us to lose the sweet, simple melody and to close with strange, heavy chords when it changes to a scene of banquet hospitality. Do you mean that it actually keeps the shepherd figure to the end?”
“Certainly, good friends.”
With keen personal interest I asked him to tell us how we might see it as a shepherd psalm throughout. So we listened and he talked, over the cooling teacups.