Christmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study of
imagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched and
gemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, for I know
they are the numbers of many years. The visages of two or three are sad
enough, but on the whole 'tis a congregation of jolly ghosts. The
nostrils of my memory are assailed by a faint odor of plum-pudding and
burnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a whisk of women's
dresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by
friends. Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made
grave, on which the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in
white like the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of
dance music, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I
know that sprig of mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung
the girl I loved--girl no more now than I am a boy--and kissed her spite
of blush and pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in
hand, over which blue tongues of flame are playing, I do know--most
ancient apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to
very days of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in a
ghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrust
their fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also would
I drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burial
service murmur.
- - - - -
This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The
smith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is
at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang
from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the
villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces--the latter
a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in
the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers--and took their
places decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautiful
prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at
any other period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time
the barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and
man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the
worshipper of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest
in their graves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a
kinship with the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout
lips of the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur;
along this road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead,
our brothers and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as
ours at present approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman--who is no
Boanerges, of Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted,
pious man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of
charity and kindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the
clergyman, I say--for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and
one must double back to secure connexion--read out in that silvery voice
of his, which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the
New Testament that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the red-faced
rustic congregation hung on the good man's voice as he spoke of the
Infant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared in
the mid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its
station in the sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid
their gifts of frankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child. With the
story every one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the
persuasive melody of the reader's voice, it seemed to all quite new--at
least, they listened attentively as if it were. The discourse that
followed possessed no remarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the
goodness of the Maker of heaven and earth, and the shortness of time,
with the duties of thankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am
persuaded that every one who heard returned to his house in a better
frame of mind. And so the service remitted us all to our own homes, to
what roast-beef and plum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings
around cheerful fires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the
dead and the absent.
From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to
hold Christmas alone. I have no one with me at table, and my own
thoughts must be my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to
think how much kindly feeling exists this present night in England. By
imagination I can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently
join in every roar of merriment. I become a sort of universal guest.
With what propriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December
rains and snows! How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom
everything is turned topsy-turvy, and who holds Christmas at midsummer!
The face of Christmas glows all the brighter for the cold. The heart
warms as the frost increases. Estrangements which have embittered the
whole year, melt in to-night's hospitable smile. There are warmer
handshakings on this night than during the by-past twelve months. Friend
lives in the mind of friend. There is more charity at this time than at
any other. You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the
half-benumbed musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any
other time you would consider their performance a nuisance, and call
angrily for the police. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless
grates, come home at this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they
give of their abundance. The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his
Christmas feast. Good feeling incarnates itself into plum-pudding. The
Master's words, "The poor ye have always with you," wear at this time a
deep significance. For at least one night on each year over all
Christendom there is brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their
families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they remember the light,
that shone over the poor clowns huddling on the Bethlehem plains
eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead,
the song "Peace on earth and good-will toward men," which for the first
hallowed the midnight air,--pray for that strain's fulfilment, that
battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on
Christmas eve, but the whole year round, men shall be brethren owning
one Father in heaven.
- - - - -
Once again, for the purpose of taking away all solitariness of feeling,
and of connecting myself, albeit only in fancy, with the proper gladness
of the time, let me think of the comfortable family dinners now being
drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made,
quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from the
feelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats
lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight of
all, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beaming
juvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of
happy laughter which a clown's joke brings down in mighty avalanches. In
the pit, sober people relax themselves, and suck oranges, and quaff
ginger-pop; in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks the
Fairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, and Master, that to
be a clown must be the pinnacle of human happiness: while up in the
galleries the hard literal world is for an hour sponged out and
obliterated; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his delight when the
policeman comes to grief, the harsh call of his master, and Cinderella,
when the demons are foiled, and the long parted lovers meet and embrace
in a paradise of light and pink gauze, the grates that must be scrubbed
to-morrow. All bands and trappings of toil are for one hour loosened by
the hands of imaginative sympathy. What happiness a single theatre can
contain! And those of maturer years, or of more meditative temperament,
sitting at the pantomime, can extract out of the shifting scenes
meanings suitable to themselves; for the pantomime is a symbol or
adumbration of human life. Have we not all known Harlequin, who rules
the roast, and has the pretty Columbine to himself? Do we not all know
that rogue of a clown with his peculating fingers, who brazens out of
every scrape, and who conquers the world by good humour and ready wit?
And have we not seen Pantaloons not a few, whose fate it is to get all
the kicks and lose all the halfpence, to fall through all the trap
doors, break their shins over all the barrows, and be forever captured
by the policeman, while the true pilferer, the clown, makes his escape
with the booty in his possession? Methinks I know the realities of which
these things are but the shadows; have met with them in business, have
sat with them at dinner. But to-night no such notions as these intrude;
and when the torrent of fun, and transformation, and practical joking
which rushed out of the beautiful fairy world gathered up again, the
high-heaped happiness of the theatre will disperse itself, and the
Christmas pantomime will be a pleasant memory the whole year through.
Thousands on thousands of people are having their midriffs tickled at
this moment; in fancy I see their lighted faces, in memory I see their
mirth.
By this time I should think every Christmas dinner at Dreamthorp or
elsewhere has come to an end. Even now in the great cities the theatres
will be dispersing. The clown has wiped the paint off his face.
Harlequin has laid aside his wand, and divested himself of his
glittering raiment; Pantaloon, after refreshing himself with a pint of
porter, is rubbing his aching joints; and Columbine, wrapped up in a
shawl, and with sleepy eyelids, has gone home in a cab. Soon, in the
great theatre, the lights will be put out, and the empty stage will be
left to ghosts. Hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through
the frosty air. I look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way
of powdery splendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of
stars and planets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the
armed apparition of Orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable
space, gleaming overhead; and the familiar constellation of the Plough
dipping down into the west; and I think when I go in again that there is
one Christmas the less between me and my grave.
* * * * *
CHRISTMAS CAROL
PHILLIPS BROOKS
The earth has grown old with its burden of care,
But at Christmas it always is young,
The heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair,
And its soul full of music bursts forth on the air,
When the song of the angels is sung.
It is coming, Old Earth, it is coming to-night!
On the snowflakes which cover thy sod
The feet of the Christ-child fall gentle and white,
And the voice of the Christ-child tells out with delight
That mankind are the children of God.
On the sad and the lonely, the wretched and poor,
The voice of the Christ-child shall fall;
And to every blind wanderer open the door
Of hope that he dared not to dream of before,
With a sunshine of welcome for all.
The feet of the humblest may walk in the field
Where the feet of the Holiest trod,
This, then, is the marvel to mortals revealed
When the silvery trumpets of Christmas have pealed,
That mankind are the children of God.
* * * * *
THE END OF THE PLAY
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The play is done--the curtain drops,
Slow-falling to the prompter's bell:
A moment yet the actor stops,
And looks around, to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task;
And, when he's laughed and said his say,
He shows, as he removes his mask,
A face that's anything but gay.
One word, ere yet the evening ends,
Let's close it with a parting rhyme;
And pledge a hand to all young friends,
As fits the merry Christmas time.
On life's wide scene you, too, have parts
That fate erelong shall bid you play;
Good-night!--with honest, gentle hearts
A kindly greeting go alway!
Good-night!--I'd say the griefs, the joys,
Just hinted in this mimic page,
The triumphs and defeats of boys,
Are but repeated in our age.
I'd say your woes were not less keen,
Your hopes more vain than those of men,
Your pangs or pleasures of fifteen
At forty-five played o'er again.
I'd say we suffer and we strive,
Not less nor more as men than boys,
With grizzled beards at forty-five
As erst at twelve in corduroys;
And if, in time of sacred youth,
We learned at home to love and pray,
Pray Heaven that early love and truth
May never wholly pass away.
And in the world as in the school
I'd say how fate may change and shift,
The prize be sometimes to the fool,
The race not always to the swift:
The strong may yield, the good may fall,
The great man be a vulgar clown,
The knave be lifted over all,
The kind cast pitilessly down.
Who knows the inscrutable design?
Blessèd be He who took and gave!
Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
Be weeping at her darling's grave?
We bow to Heaven that willed it so,
That darkly rules the fate of all,
That sends the respite or the blow,
That's free to give or to recall.
This crowns his feast with wine and wit,--
Who brought him to that mirth and state?
His betters, see, below him sit,
Or hunger hopeless at the gate!
Who bade the mud from Dives's wheel
To spurn the rags of Lazarus?
Come, brother, in that dust we'll kneel,
Confessing Heaven that ruled it thus.
So each shall mourn, in life's advance,
Dear hopes, dear friends, untimely killed;
Shall grieve for many a forfeit chance,
And longing passion unfulfilled.
Amen!--whatever fate be sent,
Pray God the heart may kindly glow,
Although the head with cares be bent,
And whitened with the winter snow!
Come wealth or want, come good or ill,
Let young and old accept their part,
And bow before the awful will,
And bear it with an honest heart.
Who misses or who wins the prize,
Go, lose or conquer, as you can;
But if you fail, or if you rise,
Be each, pray God, a gentleman!
A gentleman, or old or young!
(Bear kindly with my humble lays;)
The sacred chorus first was sung
Upon the first of Christmas days;
The shepherds heard it overhead,--
The joyful angels raised it then:
"Glory to Heaven on high," it said,
"And peace on earth to gentle men!"
My song, save this, is little worth;
I lay the weary pen aside,
And wish you health and love and mirth,
As fits the solemn Christmas-tide.
As fits the holy Christmas birth,
Be this, good friends, our carol still:
Be peace on earth, be peace on earth
To men of gentle will!
* * * * *
CHRIST'S NATIVITY
HENRY VAUGHAN
Awake, glad heart! get up and sing!
It is the Birthday of thy King.
Awake! awake!
The sun doth shake
Light from his locks, and, all the way
Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day.
Awake! awake! hark how th' wood rings,
Winds whisper, and the busy springs
A concert make!
Awake! awake!
Man is their high-priest, and should rise
To offer up the sacrifice.
I would I were some bird, or star,
Fluttering in woods, or lifted far
Above this inn,
And road of sin!
Then either star or bird should be
Shining or singing still to thee.
I would I had in my best part
Fit rooms for thee! or that my heart
Where so clean as
Thy manger was!
But I am all filth, and obscene;
Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean.
Sweet Jesu! will then. Let no more
This leper haunt and soil thy door!
Cure him, ease him,
O release him!
And let once more, by mystic birth,
The Lord of life be born in earth.
* * * * *
CHRISTMAS DREAMS
CHRISTOPHER NORTH
To-morrow is Merry Christmas; and when its night descends there will be
mirth and music, and the light sounds of the merry-twinkling feet within
these now so melancholy walls--and sleep now reigning over all the house
save this one room, will be banished far over the sea--and morning will
be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.
Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration,
painted according to nature--what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a
sameness would pervade them all--but only that kind of sameness that
pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common
eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon
and some stars--a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few
castellated, clouds? yet no two nights ever bore more than a family
resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him
who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and
frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with
the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that
illumine those skies--and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be
black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.
"Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go"--is a fine line of
Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without
producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of
doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by
Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one,
even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among
the dead. But they are not dead--but only sleep; though to us who recall
them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates,
let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing sweet when of their own
accord they arise to greet us in our solitude!--as a friend who, having
sailed away to a foreign land in our youth, has been thought to have
died many long years ago, may suddenly stand before us, with face still
familiar and name reviving in a moment, and all that he once was to us
brought from utter forgetfulness close upon our heart.
My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the
din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds
on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays--Christmas Day itself--Christmas
Night--and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we
brothers and sisters so dear to one another--never before had our hearts
so yearned towards the authors of our being--our blissful being! There
they sat--silent in all that outcry--composed in all that
disarray--still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp
sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a
prisoner--a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be
felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy flight. One
old game treads on the heels of another--twenty within the hour--and
many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the
collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of
genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a
hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when
the moon drops behind the mountain, and small green-robed People of
Peace at once cease their pastime, and vanish. For she--the
Silver-Tongued--is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike
hundreds of years old--and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall,
with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below--and, ere
another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be
mute on earth--but to be hymning in Heaven.
Of that House--to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings--with its
old ivyed turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with
flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its
foundations has vanished along with them--and a crowd of other
buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single
tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne;
which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for
one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we
ourselves--then so linked in love that the band which bound us
altogether was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood--to be
scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild
parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought
together no more! The old Abbey--it still survives; and there, in that
corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was last
in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and
nests--there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and
Venerated--for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have
fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to
have ceased to weep--so seldom to have remembered!--And then, with a
powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the
floods we all wept together--at no long interval--on those pale and
placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in
their coffins.
We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy
that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed,
and genius dies with it. In favored spirits, neither few nor many, the
joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be
accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it
brings before us must be inspired with beauty--that is, with affection
or passion. All minds, even the dullest, remember the days of their
youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that
blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely
recollect but they must imagine, the hills and valleys--if any such
there were--in which their childhood played, the torrents, the
waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial
dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky.
To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature.
He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart,
and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into
these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present
by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken.
So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the
shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's
house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and
buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must
combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the
spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest
with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can
satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first
aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can
preserve them to us unimpaired--
"For she can give us back the dead,
Even in the loveliest looks they wore."
Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated, one year in this
family, another year in that--none present but those whom Charles Lamb
the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all
features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin
from one root--relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be
ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth, their lot being
cast within that pleasant realm, "the Golden Mean," where the dwellings
are connecting links between the hut and the hall--fair edifices
resembling manse or mansion-house, according as the atmosphere expands
or contracts their dimensions--in which Competence is next-door neighbor
to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of Contentment.
Merry Christmases they were indeed--one Lady always presiding, with a
figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then
somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most
venerable years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her
grandchildren's ears. Nor did these solemn eyes, bedimmed into a
pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs
that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly
she loved all those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave;
but she sat in sunshine even within the shadow of death; and the "voice
that called her home" had so long been whispering in her ear, that its
accents had become dear to her, and consolatory every word that was
heard in the silence, as from another world.