subside with the great event of the nativity itself. The incidents of
striking interest which immediately followed the birth of the Messiah,
the persecutions which were directed against his life, and the starry
writing of God in the sky, which, amid the rejection of "his own," drew
to him witnesses from afar, all contribute to keep alive the sense of a
sacred celebration to the end of the period usually devoted to social
festivity, and send a wholesome current of religious feeling through the
entire season, to temper its extravagancies and regulate its mirth. The
worship of the shepherds; the lamentation in Rama, and the weeping of
Rachel for the murder of the innocents; the miraculous escape from that
massacre of the Saviour, and the flight of his parents into Egypt with
the rescued child; and the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles,
which is indeed the day of his nativity to _us_,--are all commemorated
in the Christian Church, and illustrated by the series of services
distributed through that period of religious worship which bears the
general title of Christmas.
There is, too, in the lengthened duration of this festival a direct
cause of that joyous and holiday spirit which, for the most part (after
the first tenderness of meeting has passed away, and a few tears perhaps
been given, as the muster-roll is perused, to those who answer to their
names no more), pervades all whom that same duration has tempted to
assemble.
Regrets there will no doubt, in most cases, be, for these distant and
periodical gatherings together of families but show more prominently
the blanks which the long intervals have created; this putting on anew,
as it were, of the garment of love but exposes the rents which time has
made since it was last worn; this renewing of the chain of our
attachments but displays the links that are broken! The Sybil has come
round again, as year by year she comes, with her books of the
affections; but new leaves have been torn away. "No man," says
Shakspeare, "ever bathed twice in the same river;" and the home-Jordan
to which the observers of the Christmas festival come yearly back to
wash away the leprous spots contracted in the world never presents to
them again the identical waters in which last they sported, though it be
Jordan still. Amid these jubilant harmonies of the heart there will be
parts unfilled up, voices wanting. "This young gentlewoman," says the
Countess of Rousillon to Lafeu, "had a father (oh that _had_! how sad a
passage 'tis!)." And surely with such changes as are implied in that
past tense some of the notes of life's early music are silenced forever.
"Would they were with us still!" says the old ballad; and in the first
hour of these reunions many and many a time is the wish echoed in
something like the words! And if these celebrations have been too long
disused, and the wanderer comes rarely back to the birthplace of the
affections, the feeling of sadness may be too strong for the joyous
influences of the season,--
"A change" _he may find_ "there, and many a change!
Faces and footsteps and all things strange!
Gone are the heads of the silvery hair,
And the young that were, have a brow of care,
And the place is hushed where the children played!"
till, amid the bitter contrasts of the past with the present, and
thoughts of "the loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead," something
like
"A pall,
And a gloom o'ershadowing the banquet-hall,
And a mark on the floor as of life-drops spilt,"
may spoil his ear for the voice of mirth, and darken all the revels of
the merry Christmas-tide.
* * * * *
To few assemblages of men is it given to come together in the scene of
ancient memories without having to "remember such things were that were
most precious." But excepting in those cases in which the suffering is
extreme or the sorrow immediate, after a few hours given to a wholesome
and perhaps mournful retrospect, the mind readjusts itself to the tone
of the time, and men for the most part seem to understand that they are
met for the purpose of being as merry as it is in their natures to be.
And to the attainment of this right joyous frame of mind we have already
said that a sense of the duration of the festival period greatly
contributes. In the case of a single holiday the mind has scarcely time
to take the appropriate tone before the period of celebration has
passed away; and a sense of its transitoriness tends often to prevent
the effort being made with that heartiness which helps to insure
success.
But when the holiday of to-day terminates only that it may make way for
the holiday of to-morrow, and gladness has an ancient charter in virtue
of which it claims dominion over a series of days so extended that the
happy school-boy (and some who are quite as happy as school-boys, and as
merry too) cannot see the end of them for the blaze of joyous things
that lies between,--then does the heart surrender itself confidently to
the genius of the time, and lets loose a host of cheerful and kindly
feelings, which it knows will not be suddenly thrown back upon it, and
heaps up pleasant devices upon the glowing flame of mirth, as we heap up
logs on the roaring fire, laying them decently aside at the end of the
season, as we lay aside the burned-out brand of the Yule log to
re-kindle the Christmas fire and the Christmas feeling of another year.
But there is yet another reason, in aid of those which we have
enumerated, accounting for an observance of the Christmas festivities
more universal, and a preservation of its traditions more accurate and
entire, than are bestowed in England upon the festival customs of any
other period of the year. This reason, which might not at first view
seem so favorable to that end as in truth it is, is to be found in the
outward and natural aspects of the season. We have been watching the
year through the period of its decline, are arrived at the dreary season
of its old age, and stand near the edge of its grave. We have seen the
rich sunshines and sweet but mournful twilights of autumn, with their
solemn inspirations, give place to the short days and gloomy evenings
which usher in the coming solstice. One by one the fair faces of the
flowers have departed from us, and the sweet murmuring of "shallow
rivers, by whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals," has been
exchanged for the harsh voice of the swollen torrent and the dreary
music of winds that "rave through the naked tree." Through many a
chilling sign of "weary winter comin' fast," we have reached the
"Last of the months, severest of them all.
. . . . . . .
For lo! the fiery horses of the Sun
Through the twelve signs their rapid course have run;
Time, like a serpent, bites his forked tail,
And Winter, on a goat, bestrides the gale;
Rough blows the North-wind near Arcturus' star,
And sweeps, unreined, across the polar bar."
The halcyon days, which sometimes extend their southern influence even
to our stern climate, and carry an interval of gloomy calm into the
heart of this dreary month, have generally ere its close given place to
the nipping frosts and chilling blasts of mid-winter. "Out of the South"
hath come "the whirlwind, and cold out of the North." The days have
dwindled to their smallest stature, and the long nights, with their
atmosphere of mist, shut in and circumscribe the wanderings of man.
Clouds and shadows surround us. The air has lost its rich echoes, and
the earth its diversified aspects; and to the immediate threshold of the
house of feasting and merriment we have travelled through those dreary
days which are emphatically called "the dark days before Christmas." Of
one of the gloomy mornings that usher in these melancholy days Ben
Jonson gives the following dismal description:--
"It is, methinks, a morning full of fate!
It riseth slowly, as her sullen car
Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it!
She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black!
Her face is like a water turned to blood,
And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night, ere noon of day!
It does not look as it would have a hail
Or health wished in it--as of other morns!"
And the general discomforts of the season are bemoaned by old Sackville,
with words that have a wintry sound, in the following passage, which we
extract from "England's Parnassus:"--
"The wrathfull winter, proching on a pace,
With blustring blast had all ybard the treene;
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene;
The mantle rent wherein inwrapped beene
The gladsome groves that now lay over-throwne,
The tapers torne, and every tree downe blowne;
The soyle, that erst so seemely was to seeme,
Was all dispoiled of her beauties hewe,
And stole fresh flowers (wherewith the Somer's queene
Had clad the earth), now Boreas blast downe blew;
And small fowles flocking, in their songs did rew
The Winter's wrath, where with each thing defast,
In wofull wise bewayl'd the Sommer past:
Hawthorne had lost his motley liverie,
The naked twigs were shivering all for cold,
And, dropping down the teares aboundantlie,
Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told
The cruell season, bidding me withhold
Myselfe within."
The feelings excited by this dreary period of transition, and by the
desolate aspect of external things to which it has at length brought us,
would seem, at first view, to be little in harmony with a season of
festival, and peculiarly unpropitious to the claims of merriment. And
yet it is precisely this joyless condition of the natural world which
drives us to take refuge in our moral resources, at the same time that
it furnishes us with the leisure necessary for their successful
development. The spirit of cheerfulness which, for the blessing of man,
is implanted in his nature, deprived of the many issues by which, at
other seasons, it walks abroad and breathes amid the sights and sounds
of Nature, is driven to its own devices for modes of manifestation, and
takes up its station by the blazing hearth. In rural districts, the
varied occupations which call the sons of labor abroad into the fields
are suspended by the austerities of the time; and to the cottage of the
poor man has come a season of temporal repose, concurrently with the
falling of that period which seals anew for him, as it were, the
promises of an eternal rest. At no other portion of the year, could a
feast of equal duration find so many classes of men at leisure for its
reception.
"With his ice, and snow, and rime,
Let bleak winter sternly come!
There is not a sunnier clime
Than the love-lit winter home."
Amid the comforts of the fireside, and all its sweet companionships and
cheerful inspirations, there is something like the sense of a triumph
obtained over the hostilities of the season. Nature, which at other
times promotes the expansion of the feelings and contributes to the
enjoyments of man, seems here to have promulgated her fiat against their
indulgence; and there is a kind of consciousness of an inner world
created, in evasion of her law,--a tract won by the genius of the
affections from the domain of desolation, spots of sunshine planted by
the heart in the very bosom of shadow, a pillar of fire lit up in the
darkness. And thus the sensation of a respite from toil, the charms of
renewed companionship, the consciousness of a general sympathy of
enjoyment running along all the links of the social chain, and the
contrasts established within to the discomforts without, are all
components of that propitious feeling to which the religious spirit of
the season, and all its quaint and characteristic observances, make
their appeal.
There is, too (connected with these latter feelings, and almost
unacknowledged by the heart of man), another moral element of that
cheerful sentiment which has sprung up within it. It consists in the
prospect, even at this distant and gloomy period, of a coming spring.
This is peculiarly the season of looking forward. Already, as it were,
the infant face of the new year is perceived beneath the folds of the
old one's garment. The business of the present year has terminated, and
along the night which has succeeded to its season of labor have been set
up a series of illuminations, which, we know, will be extinguished only
that the business of another seed-time may begin.
Neither, amid all its dreary features, is the _natural_ season without
its own picturesque beauty, nor even entirely divested of all its summer
indications of a living loveliness, or all suggestions of an eternal
hope. Not only hath it the peculiar beauties of old age, but it hath
besides lingering traces of that beauty which old age hath not been able
wholly to extinguish, and which come finely in aid of the moral hints
and religious hopes of the season.
The former--the graces which are peculiar to the season itself--exist in
many a natural aspect and grotesque effect, which is striking both for
the variety it offers and for its own intrinsic loveliness.
"We may find it in the wintry boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky,
While soft on icy pool and stream the pencilled shadows lie,
When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frost-work bound,
Whence the flitting red-breast shakes a shower of blossoms to
the ground."
The white mantle which the earth occasionally puts on with the rapidity
of a spell, covering, in the course of a night and while we have slept,
the familiar forms with a sort of strangeness that makes us feel as if
we had awakened in some new and enchanted land; the fantastic forms
assumed by the drifting snow; the wild and fanciful sketching of old
winter upon the "frosty pane;" the icicles that depend like stalactites
from every projection, and sparkle in the sun like jewels of the most
brilliant water; and, above all, the feathery investiture of the trees
above alluded to, by which their minute tracery is brought out with a
richness shaming the carving of the finest chisel,--are amongst the
features which exhibit the inexhaustible fertility of Nature in the
production of striking and beautiful effects. Hear how one of our best
poetesses, Mary Howitt, sings of these graces:--
"One silent night hath passed, and lo,
How beautiful the earth is now!
All aspect of decay is gone,
The hills have put their vesture on,
And clothed is the forest bough.
"Say not 'tis an unlovely time!
Turn to the wide, white waste thy view;
Turn to the silent hills that rise
In their cold beauty to the skies,
And to those skies intensely blue.
. . . . . . .
"Walk now among the forest trees:
Saidst thou that they were stripped and bare?
Each heavy bough is bending down
With snowy leaves and flowers,--the crown
Which Winter regally doth wear.
"'Tis well; thy summer garden ne'er
Was lovelier, with its birds and flowers,
Than is this silent place of snow,
With feathery branches drooping low,
Wreathing around thee shadowy bowers!"
While on the subject of the natural beauties of this season, we must
introduce our readers to some admirable verses which have been furnished
to us by our friend Mr. Stoddart, the author of that fine poem the
"Death-Wake," and in which its peculiar aspects are described with a
very graphic pen:
A WINTER LANDSCAPE.
The dew-lark sitteth on the ice, beside the reedless rill;
The leaf of the hawthorn flutters on the solitary hill;
The wild lake weareth on its heart a cold and changed look,
And meets, at the lip of its moon-lit marge, the spiritual brook.
Idly basks the silver swan, near to the isle of trees,
And to its proud breast come and kiss the billow and the breeze;
They wash the eider as they play about the bird of grace,
And boom, in the same slow mood, away, to the moveless mountain-base.
The chieftain-deer, amid the pines, his antlered forehead shows,
And scarcely are the mosses bent where that stately one arose;
His step is as the pressure of a light beloved hand,
And he looketh like a poet's dream in some enchanted land!
A voice of Winter, on the last wild gust of Autumn borne,
Is hurried from the hills afar, like the windings of a horn;
And solemnly and heavily the silver birches groan,
And the old ash waves his wizard hand to the dim, mysterious tone.
And noiselessly, across the heaven, a gray and vapory shred
Is wandering, fed by phantom clouds that one by one are led
Out of the wide North, where they grow within the aged sea,
And in their coils the yellow moon is laboring lazily!
She throws them from her mystic urn, as they were beckoned back
By some enchantress, working out her spells upon their track;
Or gathers up their fleecy folds, and shapes them, as they go,
To hang around her beautiful form a tracery of snow.
Lo, Winter cometh!--and his hoar is heavy on the hill,
And curiously the frostwork forms below the rimy rill;
The birth of morn is a gift of pearl to the heath and willow-tree,
And the green rush hangs o'er its water-bed, shining and silvery.
From the calm of the lake a vapor steals its restless wreath away,
And leaves not a crisp on the quiet tarn but the wake of the swan
at play;
The deer holds up the glistening heath, where his hoof is lightly
heard,
And the dew-lark circleth to his song,--sun-lost and lonely bird!
But the season hath other striking aspects of its own. Pleasant, says
Southey,--
"To the sobered soul,
The silence of the wintry scene;
When Nature shrouds her in her trance,
In deep tranquillity.
"Not undelightful now to roam
The wild heath sparkling on the sight;
Not undelightful now to pace
The forest's ample rounds,
"And see the spangled branches shine,
And snatch the moss of many a hue,
That varies the old tree's brown bark,
Or o'er the gray-stone spreads."
Mr. Southey might have mentioned, too,--as belonging to the same class
of effects with those produced by the mosses "of many a hue" that "vary
the old tree's brown bark,"--those members of the forest which retain
their dead and many tinted leaves till the ensuing spring, hanging
occasional wreaths of strange and fantastic beauty in the white tresses
of winter, together with the rich contrast presented by the red twigs of
the dog-wood amid the dark colors of the surrounding boughs. The starry
heavens, too, at this period of the year, present an occasional aspect
of extraordinary brilliancy; and the long winter nights are illustrated
by a pomp of illumination, presenting magnificent contrasts to the cold
and cheerless earth, and offering unutterable revelations at once to the
physical and mental eye.
Amongst the traces of a _former_ beauty not utterly extinguished, and
the suggestions of a summer feeling not wholly passed away, we have
those both of sight and scent and sound. The lark, "all independent of
the leafy spring," as Wordsworth says, has not long ceased to pour his
anthem through the sky. In propitious seasons, such as we have enjoyed
for some years past, he is almost a Christmas-carol singer. The
China-roses are with us still, and under proper management will stay
with us till the snowdrops come. So will the anemones and the
wallflowers; and the aconite may be won to come, long "before the
swallow dares, and take the winds of _January_ with beauty." The cold
air may be kept fragrant with the breath of the scented coltsfoot, and
the lingering perfume of the mignonette. Then we have rosemary, too,
"mocking the winter of the year with perfume,"--
"Rosemary and rue, which keep
Seeming and savor all the winter long."
"It looks," says Leigh Hunt, pleasantly, "as if we need have no winter,
if we choose, as far as flowers are concerned." "There is a story," he
adds, "in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured up a garden in
winter-time. His magic consisted in his having a knowledge beyond his
time; and magic pleasures, so to speak, await on all who choose to
exercise knowledge after his fashion."
But what we would allude to more particularly here are the evergreens,
which, with their rich and clustering berries, adorn the winter season,
offering a provision for the few birds that still remain, and hanging a
faint memory of summer about the hedges and the groves. The misletoe
with its white berries, the holly (Virgil's acanthus) with its scarlet
berries and pointed leaves, the ivy whose berries are green, the
pyracanthus with its berries of deep orange, the arbutus exhibiting its
flowers and fruit upon adjacent boughs, the glossy laurel and the
pink-eyed laurestine (not to speak of the red berries of the May-bush,
the purple sloes of the blackthorn, or others which show their clusters
upon leafless boughs, nor of the evergreen trees,--the pine, the fur,
the cedar, or the cypress), are all so many pleasant remembrancers of
the past, and so many types to man of that which is imperishable in his
own nature. And it is probably both _because_ they are such
remembrancers of what the heart so much loves, and such types of what it
so much desires, that they are gathered about our doors and within our
homes at this period of natural decay and religious regeneration, and
mingle their picturesque forms and hopeful morals with all the mysteries
and ceremonies of the season.
[Illustration: COUNTRY CAROL SINGERS.--_Page 157._]
SIGNS OF THE SEASON.
WE have said that the coming festivities of the season "fling their
shadows" long before: the _avant-couriers_ of the old man are to be seen
advancing in all directions. At home and abroad, in town and in country,
in the remote farmstead and on the king's highway, we are met by the
symptoms of his approach, and the arrangements making for his reception.
We will not dwell here on the domestic operations which are so familiar
to all,--the ample provision for good cheer, which has long been making
in every man's home who can at any time afford to make good cheer at
all. We need not remind our town readers of the increased activity
visible in all the interior departments of each establishment, and the
apparent extent and complication of its foreign relations; the councils
held with the housekeeper and cook; the despatches to the butcher,
baker, poulterer, and confectioner, which are their consequence; and the
efficient state of preparation which is arising out of all these
energetic movements. To our country readers we need not dwell upon the
slaughter of fowls in the poultry-yard, and game in the field, or the
wholesale doings within doors for the manufacture of pastry of all
conceivable kinds and in all its conceivable forms. And to neither the
one nor the other is it necessary that we should speak of the packages,
in every shape and size, which both are getting ready, for the
interchange between friends of the commodities of their respective
positions. Here, however, the town has clearly the advantage in point of
gain, and the country in point of character,--the former having little
besides barrels of oysters and baskets of Billingsgate fish to furnish
to the country larders in return for the entire range of the products of
the dairy, farmyard, and game-field.
But however lightly we may allude to the other articles which enter into
the charge of the commissariat department, and have no distinctive
character, at this particular season, beyond their unimaginable
abundance, we are by no means at liberty, without a more special notice,
to pass over the mystery of MINCE-PIE! We speak not here of the _merits_
of that marvellous compound; because a dish which has maintained without
impeachment, since long before the days of honest old Tusser (who calls
these marvels shred-pies), the same supreme character which it holds
amongst the men of these latter days, may very well dispense with our
commendation; and every school-boy knows, from his own repeated
experience, the utter inadequacy of language to convey any notion of the
ineffable flavor of this unapproachable viand. The poverty of speech is
never so conspicuous as when even its richest forms are used for the
purpose of describing that which is utterly beyond its resources; and we
have witnessed most lamentable, although ludicrous, failures, on the
part of eloquent but imprudent men, in their ambitious attempts to give
expression to their sensations under the immediate influence of this
unutterable combination. It is therefore to other properties than those
which make their appeal to the palate that we must confine ourselves in
our mention of mince-pie.