Christmas Part 9

Of garnered rhyme, from hidden stores of olden time that since the language did begin, have welcomed merry Christmas in, and made the winter nights so long, fleet by on wings of wine and song; for when the snow is on the roof, the house within is sorrow proof, if yule log blazes on the hearth, and cups and hearts o'er-brim with mirth. Then bring the wa.s.sail to the board, with nuts and fruit--the winter's h.o.a.rd; and bid the children take off shoe, to hang their stockings by the flue; and let the clear and frosty sky, set out its brightest jewelry, to show old Santa Claus the road, so he may ease his gimcrack load. And with the coming of these times, we'll add some old and l.u.s.ty rhymes, that suit the festive season well, and sound as sweet as Christmas bell.

Now just bethink of castle gate, where humble midnight mummers wait, to try if voices, one and all, can rouse the tipsy seneschal, to give them bread and beer and brawn, for tidings of the Christmas morn; or bid each yelper clear his throat, with water of the castle moat, for thus they used, by snow and torch, to rear their voices at the porch:

_Fred S. Cozzens._

Wa.s.sAILER'S SONG

ROBERT SOUTHWELL

Wa.s.sail! wa.s.sail! all over the town, Our toast it is white, and our ale it is brown; Our bowl is made of a maplin tree; We be good fellows all;--I drink to thee.

Here's to our horse, and to his right ear, G.o.d send master a happy new year; A happy new year as e'er he did see,-- With my wa.s.sailing bowl I drink to thee.

Here's to our mare, and to her right eye, G.o.d send our mistress a good Christmas pie; A good Christmas pie as e'er I did see,-- With my wa.s.sailing bowl I drink to thee.

Here's to our cow, and to her long tail, G.o.d send our measter us never may fail Of a cup of good beer: I pray you draw near, And our jolly wa.s.sail it's then you shall hear.

Be here any maids? I suppose here be some; Sure they will not let young men stand on the cold stone!

Sing hey O, maids! come trole back the pin, And the fairest maid in the house let us all in.

Come, butler, come, bring us a bowl of the best; I hope your soul in heaven will rest; But if you do bring us a bowl of the small, Then down fall butler, and bowl and all.

And here's a Christmas carol meant for children, and most excellent, and though the monk that wrote it was hung, yet still his verses may be sung.

A CAROL

As I in a h.o.a.rie winter's night Stood shivering in the snow, Surpriz'd I was with sudden heat, Which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearefull eye To view what fire was neere, A prettie babe, all burning bright, Did in the aire appeare; Who, scorched with excessive heat, Such flouds of teares did shed, As though his flouds should quench his flames, Which with his teares were bred:

Alas! (quoth he) but newly borne, In fierie heats I frie, Yet none approach to warm their hearts, Or feele my fire, but I; My faultless brest the furnace is, The fuell, wounding thornes: Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, The ashes, shames and scornes; The fuell justice layeth on, And mercy blows the coales, The metalls in this furnace wrought, Are Men's defiled soules: For which, as now on fire I am, To work them to their good, So will I melt into a bath, To wash them in my blood.

With this he vanisht out of sight, And swiftly shrunke away, And straight I called unto minde That it was Christma.s.se Day.

CHRISTMAS EVE

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

[From "My Study Fire."]

The world has been full of mysteries to-day; everybody has gone about weighted with secrets. The children's faces have fairly shone with expectancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream which at this moment holds all the children of Christendom under its spell. Was there ever a wider or more loving conspiracy than that which keeps the venerable figure of Santa Claus from slipping away, with all the other oldtime myths, into the forsaken wonderland of the past? Of all the personages whose marvelous doings once filled the minds of men, he alone survives. He has outlived all the great G.o.ds, and all the impressive and poetic conceptions which once flitted between heaven and earth; these have gone, but Santa Claus remains by virtue of a common understanding that childhood shall not be despoiled of one of its most cherished beliefs, either by the mythologist, with his sun myth theory, or the scientist, with his heartless diatribe against superst.i.tion. There is a good deal more to be said on this subject, if this were the place to say it; even superst.i.tion has its uses, and sometimes, its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and the naive embodiment of a divine fact on the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas board. For him there should be neither carol, nor holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast to whom all these things are but the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.

Rosalind and myself are thoroughly orthodox when it comes to the keeping of holidays; here at least the ways of our fathers are our ways also.

Orthodoxy generally consists in retaining and emphasizing the disagreeable ways of the fathers, and as we are both inclined to heterodoxy on these points, we make the more prominent our observance of the best of the old-time habits. I might preach a pleasant little sermon just here, taking as my text the "survival of the fittest," and ill.u.s.trating the truth from our own domestic ritual; but the season preaches its own sermon, and I should only follow the example of some ministers and get between the text and my congregation if I made the attempt. For weeks we have all been looking forward to this eventful evening, and the still more eventful morrow. There have been hurried and whispered conferences hastily suspended at the sound of a familiar step on the stair; packages of every imaginable size and shape have been surrept.i.tiously introduced into the house, and have immediately disappeared in all manner of out-of-the-way places; and for several weeks past one room has been constantly under lock and key, visited only when certain sharp-sighted eyes were occupied in other directions.

Through all this scene of mystery Rosalind has moved sedately and with sealed lips, the common confidant of all the conspirators, and herself the greatest conspirator of all. Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!

After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, with more haste and less accompaniment of talk than usual, the parlor doors were opened, and there stood the Christmas tree in a glow of light, its wonderful branches laden with all manner of strange fruits not to be found in the botanies. The wild shouts, the merry laughter, the cries of delight as one coveted fruit after another dropped into long-expectant arms still linger in my ears now that the little tapers are burnt out, the boughs left bare, and the actors in the perennial drama are fast asleep, with new and strange bedfellows selected from the spoils of the night.

Cradled between a delightful memory and a blissful antic.i.p.ation, who does not envy them?

After this charming prelude is over, Rosalind comes into the study, and studies for the fortieth time the effect of the new design of decoration which she had this year worked out, and which gives these rather somber rows of books a homelike and festive aspect. It pleases me to note the spray of holly that obscures the t.i.tle of Bacon's solemn and weighty "Essays," and I get half a page of suggestions for my notebook from the fact that a sprig of mistletoe has fallen on old Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Rosalind has reason to be satisfied, and if I read her face aright she has succeeded even in her own eyes in bringing Christmas, with its fragrant memories and its heavenly visions, into the study. I cannot help thinking, as I watch her piling up the fire for a blaze of unusual splendor, that if more studies had their Rosalinds to bring in the genial currents of life there would be more cheer and hope and large-hearted wisdom in the books which the world is reading to-day.

When the fire has reached a degree of intensity and magnitude which Rosalind thinks adequate to the occasion, I take down a well-worn volume which opens of itself at a well-worn page. It is a book which I have read and re-read many times, and always with a kindling sympathy and affection for the man who wrote it; in whatever mood I take it up there is something in it which touches me with a sense of kinship. It is not a great book, but it is a book of the heart, and books of the heart have pa.s.sed beyond the outer court of criticism before we bestow upon them that phrase of supreme regard. There are other books of the heart around me, but on Christmas Eve it is Alexander Smith's "Dreamthorp" which always seems to lie at my hand, and when I take it up the well-worn volume falls open at the essay on "Christmas." It is a good many years since Rosalind and I began to read together on Christmas Eve this beautiful meditation on the season, and now it has gathered about itself such a host of memories that it has become part of our common past. It is, indeed, a veritable palimpsest, overlaid with tender and gracious recollections out of which the original thought gains a new and subtle sweetness. As I read it aloud I know that she sees once more the familiar landscape about Dreamthorp, with the low, dark hill in the background, and over it "the tender radiance that precedes the moon"; the village windows are all lighted, and the "whole place shines like a congregation of glowworms." There are the skaters still "leaning against the frosty wind"; there is the "gray church tower amid the leafless elms," around which the echoes of the morning peal of Christmas bells still hover; the village folk have gathered, "in their best dresses and their best faces"; the beautiful service of the church has been read and answered with heartfelt responses, the familiar story has been told again simply and urgently, with applications for every thankful soul, and then the congregation has gone to its homes and its festivities.

All these things, I am sure, lie within Rosalind's vision, although she seems to see nothing but the ruddy blaze of the fire; all these things I see, as I have seen them these many Christmas Eves agone; but with this familiar landscape there are mingled all the sweet and sorrowful memories of our common life, recalled at this hour that the light of the highest truth may interpret them anew in the divine language of hope. I read on until I come to the quotation from the "Hymn to the Nativity,"

and then I close the book, and take up a copy of Milton close at hand.

We have had our commemoration service of love, and now there comes into our thought, with the organ roll of this sublime hymn, the universal truth which lies at the heart of the season. I am hardly conscious that it is my voice which makes these words audible: I am conscious only of this mighty-voiced anthem, fit for the choral song of the morning stars:

"Ring out, ye crystal spheres, And bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the ba.s.s of heaven's deep organ blow; And, with your ninefold harmony, Make up full concert to the angelic symphony.

"For, if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back and fetch the age of gold; And speckled vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold; And h.e.l.l itself will pa.s.s away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

"The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving; Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving, No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

"The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding sh.o.r.e, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edged with poplars pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent; With flower-enwoven tresses torn, The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn."

Like a psalm the great Hymn fills the air, and like a psalm it remains in the memory. The fire has burned low, and a soft and solemn light fills the room. Neither of us speaks while the clock strikes twelve. I look out of the window. The heavens are ablaze with light, and somewhere amid those circling constellations I know that a new star has found its place, and is shining with such a ray as never before fell from heaven to earth.

CHRISTMAS IN THE OLDEN TIME

WALTER SCOTT

On Christmas-eve the bells were rung; The damsel donned her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe.

Thus opened wide the baron's hall To va.s.sal, tenant, serf and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside And ceremony doffed his pride.

The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of "Post and Pair."

All hailed, with uncontrolled delight, And general voice, the happy night That to the cottage, as the crown, Brought tidings of salvation down.

The fire, with well-dried logs supplied, Went roaring up the chimney wide; The huge hall-table's oaken face, Scrubbed till it shone, the day to grace, Bore then upon its ma.s.sive board No mark to part the squire and lord.

Then was brought in the l.u.s.ty brawn By old blue-coated serving man; Then the grim boar's head frowned on high, Crested with bays and rosemary.

Well can the green-garbed ranger tell How, when and where the monster fell; What dogs before his death he tore, And all the baitings of the boar.

The wa.s.sal round, in good brown bowls, Garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls.

There the huge sirloin reeked: hard by Plum-porridge stood, and Christmas pye; Nor failed old Scotland to produce, At such high-tide, her savory goose.

Then came the merry maskers in, And carols roared with blithesome din.

If unmelodious was the song, It was a hearty note, and strong; Who lists may in their murmuring see Traces of ancient mystery; White shirts supplied the masquerade, And s.m.u.tted cheeks the visors made; But O, what maskers richly dight, Can boast of bosoms half so light!

England was "merry England" when Old Christmas brought his sports again; 'Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale, 'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale; A Christmas gambol oft would cheer The poor man's heart through half the year.

SLY SANTA CLAUS