Whether we were indeed all so witty as we thought ourselves--uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," it might be presumptuous in us, who were considered by ourselves and a few others not the least amusing of the whole set, at this distance of time to decide--especially in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun--a species of impertinence for which we have therefore a kindness even to this day.

Had incomparable Thomas Hood had the good fortune to have been born a cousin of ours, how with that fine fancy of his would he have shone at those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! Our family, through all its different branches, has ever been famous for bad voices, but good ears; and we think we hear ourselves--all those uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, and cousins--singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woeful failures were rapturously encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender glance of the eye--a tender pressure of the hand--for cousins are not altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character, possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own; as didst thou, Emily the "Wild-cap!"--That _sobriquet_ all forgotten now--for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy showering smiles.

On rolled Suns and Seasons--the old died--the elderly became old--and the young, one after another, were wafted joyously away on the wings of hope, like birds almost as soon as they can fly ungratefully forsaking their nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they first essayed their pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed their snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close to whose shores of silvery sand had grown the trees that furnished timber both for hull and mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer-day, and gathering every breeze that blows, go dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees, transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun, and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate.

Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy not too painfully to touch the heart. For some hearts grow cold and forbidding with selfish cares--some, warm as ever in their own generous glow, were touched by the chill of Fortune's frowns, ever worst to bear when suddenly succeeding her smiles--some, to rid themselves of painful regrets, took refuge in forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past--duty banished some abroad, and duty imprisoned others at home--estrangements there were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet ere long, though causeless, complete--changes were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in the innermost nature of those who being friends knew no guile, yet came thereby at last to be friends no more--unrequited love broke some bonds--requited love relaxed others--the death of one altered the conditions of many--and so--year after year--the Christmas Meeting was interrupted--deferred--till finally it ceased with one accord, unrenewed and unrenewable. For when Some Things cease for a time--that time turns out to be for ever.

Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be--should these imperfect remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts--for his, though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in body is not to be estranged in spirit--and many a dream and many a vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the expression of a doubt--of a fear--than of a belief or a conviction. The soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all intervening darkness--and of those more especially dear it keeps within itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of morning--ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight hush--methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music--

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale, pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the memory of the pious--the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking from one of many domes--from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen--and in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination spiritualised--a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,--our eyes fixed all the while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears--and in the setting sunlight we behold mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow--

"Nodding their heads, before us go, The merry minstrelsy."

They sing a salutation at every door, familiarly naming old and young by their Christian names; and the eyes that look upward from the vales to the hanging huts among the plats and cliffs, see the shadows of the dancers ever and anon crossing the light of the star-like window, and the merry music is heard like an echo dwelling in the sky. Across those humble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week nights of yore--wandering through our solitary sylvan haunts, under the branches of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept--venture in, unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers, and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without the shadow of our figure? And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully, though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an unobserved--but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales, woods, groves, single trees, dwellings--all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are, indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself--it will not sink into the earth--it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! that ONE HOUSE!--and well might the sight of ye two together--were it harder--break our heart. But hard at all it is not--therefore it is but crushed.

Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher than the Andes in heaven--but sole-sitting at midnight in a small chamber--a melancholy man are we--and there seems a smile of consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust.

Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest,"

have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her records--blanks are there that ought to have been painted with imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation--for who can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the ghastlier gloom of present misery? The phantoms that will not come when we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our anguish we could almost pray that they might be reburied in oblivion.

Such hauntings as these are not as if they were visionary--they come and go like forms and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we vainly stretch out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to intrench ourselves by thoughts of this world against their visitation?

The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they being dead! Shall we the survivors, for yet a little while, walk in other companionship out into the day, and let the sunbeams settle on their heads as they used to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and show to those in heaven that love for them is now best expressed by remorse and penitence!

Sometimes we have fears about our memory--that it is decaying; for, lately, many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful--confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces--tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion hallowed, a sacrifice of tears.

For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means what the Germans would call in English--our winter environment. We are imprisoned in a net of our own weaving--an invisible net; yet we can see it when we choose--just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his poll under his plumes--as free in confinement as if let loose into the boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth, the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is; and we have improved on that idea, for we have built our own--and are prisoner, turnkey, and jailer all in one, and 'tis noiseless as the house of sleep. Or what if we declare that Christopher North is a king in his palace, with no subjects but his own thoughts--his rule peaceful over those lights and shadows--and undisputed to reign over them his right divine.

The opening year in a town, now, answers in all things to our heart's desire. How beautiful the smoky air! The clouds have a homely look as they hang over the happy families of houses, and seem as if they loved their birthplace; all unlike those heartless clouds that keep _stravaiging_ over mountain-tops, and have no domicile in the sky! Poets speak of living rocks, but what is their life to that of houses? Who ever saw a rock with eyes--that is, with windows? Stone-blind all, and stone-deaf, and with hearts of stone; whereas who ever saw a house without eyes--that is, windows? Our own is an Argus; yet the good old Conservative grudges not the assessed taxes--his optics are as cheerful as the day that lends them light, and they love to salute the setting sun, as if a hundred beacons, level above level, were kindled along a mountain side. He might safely be pronounced a madman who preferred an avenue of trees to a street. Why, trees have no chimneys; and, were you to kindle a fire in the hollow of an oak, you would soon be as dead as a Druid. It won't do to talk to us of sap, and the circulation of sap. A grove in winter, bole and branch--leaves it has none--is as dry as a volume of sermons. But a street, or a square, is full of "vital sparks of heavenly flame" as a volume of poetry, and the heart's blood circulates through the system like rosy wine.

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we beseech you to pardon us--ye rocks of Pavey-Ark, the pillared palaces of the storms--ye clouds, now wreathing a diadem for the forehead of Helvellyn--ye trees, that hang the shadows of your undying beauty over the "one perfect chrysolite" of blessed Windermere!

Our meaning is transparent now as the hand of an apparition waving peace and goodwill to all dwellers in the land of dreams. In plainer but not simpler words (for words are like flowers, often rich in their simplicity--witness the Lily, and Solomon's Song)--Christian people all, we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year, in town or in country--or in ships at sea.

A Happy New-Year!--Ah! ere this ARIA, sung _sotto voce_, reach your ears (eyes are ears, and ears eyes), the week of all weeks will be over and gone, and the New-Year will seem growing out of the old year's ashes!--for the year is your only Phoenix. But what with time to do has a wish--a hope--a prayer! Their power is in the Spirit that gives them birth. And what is Spirit but the well-head of thoughts and feelings flowing and overflowing all life, yet leaving the well-head full of water as ever--so lucid, that on your gazing intently into its depths, it seems to become a large soft spiritual eye, reflecting the heavens and the earth; and no one knows what the heavens and the earth are, till he has seen them there--for that God made the heavens and the earth we feel from that beautiful revelation--and where feeling is not, knowledge is dead, and a blank the universe. Love is life. The unloving merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty!

are these our feelings"--thought we once in a dream--"all circling in the sunshine--fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing on the sky--"to and fro for our delight"--no sound on their wings more than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were composed of light--and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off music--as of an angel's song.

That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad awake--and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof--and it inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole world, then, promise henceforth to love us?--and we promise henceforth to love the whole world.

It seems the easiest of all easy things to be kind and good--and then it is so pleasant! "Self-love and social are the same," beyond all question; and in that lies the nobility of our nature. The intensest feeling of self is that of belonging to a brotherhood. All selves then know they have duties which are in truth loves--and loves are joys--whether breathed in silence, or uttered in words, or embodied in actions; and if they filled all life, then all life would be good--and heaven would be no more than a better earth. And how may all men go to heaven? By making themselves a heaven on earth, and thus preparing their spirits to breathe empyreal air when they have dropped the dust. And how may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all--oh! not nearly all--is in the site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground--and within hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings that inspired them--etherealised--will not make--FAITH! "The day-spring from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line--nor need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight saying--"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice--one young voice--all by its sweet, sad, solitary self, singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen, Sole or responsive to each other's voice, Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of heaven; but she--a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"--

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its everlasting gates--opening not surely for her own sake--for all of woman born are sinful--and even she in what love calls her innocence feels that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions; nothing will go down with them but _the intense_. They are intolerant--or careless--or even ashamed of those emotions and affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe--or their own mere physical excitement for the enthusiasm of imagination soaring through the storm on the wings of intellect. There are such things in "Satan's Invisible World Displayed" in poetry, as strong and dark passions; and they who are acquainted with their origin and end call them _bad_ passions; but the good passions are not dark, but bright--and they are strong too, stronger than death or the grave.

All human beings who know how to reap

"The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

feel, by the touch, the flowers of affection in every handful of beauty they gather up from those fortunate fields on which shines, for ever through all seasons, the sun of life. How soft the leaves! and, as they meet the eye, how fair! Framed, so might it seem, of green dew consolidated into fragrance. Nor do they fade when gently taken from their stalk on its native bed. They flourish for ever if you bruise them not--sensitive indeed; and, if you are so forgetful as to treat them rashly, like those of the plant that bears that name, they shrink, and seem to shrivel for a time--growing pale, as if upbraiding your harshness; but cherished, they are seen to be all of

"Immortal amaranth, the tree that grows Fast by the throne of God;"

for the seeds have fallen from heaven to earth, and for eighteen hundred years have been spreading themselves over all soils fit for their reception--and what soil is not fit? Even fit are stony places, and places full of thorns. For they will live and grow there in spite of such obstruction--and among rank and matted weeds will often be seen peering out like primroses gladdening the desert.

That voice again--"One of old Scotland's songs, so sad and slow!" Her heart is now blamelessly with things of earth. "Sad and slow!" and most purely sweet. Almost mournful although it be, it breathes of happiness--for the joy dearest to the soul has ever a faint tinge of grief. O innocent enchantress! thou encirclest us with a wavering haze of beautiful imagery, by the spell of that voice awakening after a mood of awe, but for thy own delight. From the long dim tracts of the past come strangely blended recognitions of woe and bliss, undistinguishable now to our own heart--nor knows that heart if it be a dream of imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest hours there may have been something in common with our most sorrowful--some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other--when they are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the stillness of the time that has gone by--just like the human being whom they adorned or degraded--when they, too, are at last buried together in the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been, more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been so--and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored--oh, the miser!--over Percy's "Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the masters of the mighty--their strains have, like the voice of a solitary lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while they weep--

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were written by Pity's self.

DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep, Where I and my true love may sleep!

We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep, Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low, Where winter winds may never blow!-- And it shall be five fathom low, Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill, Where grows the mountain daffodil!-- And it shall be on yonder hill, Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers, To fright away the fairy fires!-- We'll plant it round with holy briers!

To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine, And nodding heads of columbine!-- We'll set it round with celandine, And nodding heads of columbine!

And let the ruddock build his nest Just above my true love's breast!-- The ruddock he shall build his nest Just above thy true love's breast!