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youths, with fair girls, with those who were dearer to me than life itself-all mouldered into churchyard dust long ago—their graves all level with the churchyard grass, quite undistinguishable now to the eye. My whole life has, during the last few hours, passed before me in long-drawn, many-coloured procession-in spaces of clear sunshine, alternating with the gloom of tempest. Now it was laughter and merry voices, and now a dead silence, in which was only heard the dropping of bitter tears. I remembered my own youth, with its fiery aspirations and hopes; I remembered the great shadow of Death that fell across my path at noon-day, making afternoon of my whole life thereafter; and I remembered, with something of a sigh, my existence since its aimlessness, so far as personal achievement is concernedthe half-loving cynicism, which has grown over my nature like a crust, keeping out the sunshine often, warding off blows sometimes, too-the importance I attach to trifles, the strange humours in which I indulge, and the pleasures I derive from the commonest scenes and the most humdrum events-this retrospection has not been altogether pleasant, and yet I cannot say it has been altogether painful. I can quite readily imagine a happier Christmas dinner than this of mine, and quite as readily can I imagine a more disagreeable. There is not much for me to do now in the world. I have but to wait till the shadow comes to say that I am wanted by the Master. His coming cannot be far off now, and my prayer is that I may be found prepared. Happy they who at the close of a long life sit down, as it were, patiently at the door of heaven, waiting till Death opens it, and bids them enter!

Although suggested by the season, and a lonely Christmas dinner, it is not my purpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk. Let it pass, however. This is Christmas Day, the anniversary of the world's greatest event. Isaiah, standing on the peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations of many centuries, and saw on the horizon the new Star arise, and was glad. On this night, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Pagan heaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of its snows. On this night, so many hundred years by-gone, the despairing voice was heard shrieking in the Ægean, "Pan is dead! great Pan is dead!" At this night, according to the poets, all things that blast and blight are powerless-disarmed by sweet influences :

"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes,
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time."

The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new faith has been a favourite subject with the poets; and it is strange enough that, with

one exception, the noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinities, and at the same time the most eloquent celebration of the new Power and prophecy of its triumphs, has been uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be called a Christian poet. It was written near the close of his life, and perhaps, had he remained longer amongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. Of this I am certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant but misguided man was rapidly changing; that for him the Cross was gathering attractions round it; that the wall, which he complained had been built up between his heart and his intellect, was being broken down; and that rays of a new splendour were already streaming upon him through the chinks. What a contrast between the darkened glory of "Queen Mab"-of which in after life he was heartily ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression of opinion-and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem !

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"Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep,

From one whose dreams are paradise,

Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes;

So fleet, so faint, so fair,

The powers of earth and air,

Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.

Apollo, Pan, and Love,

And even Olympian Jove,

Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.

Our hills, and seas, and streams,

Dispeopled of their dreams,

Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years."

It has been my custom for many seasons to read Milton's "Hymn on the Nativity" on the evening of Christmas Day. To my ear the lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling organ of a cathedral, when. the afternoon light, streaming through painted windows, fills the place with solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom. What a magnificent opening-the Prince of Peace entering a world then dwelling in unwonted peace !

"Nor war nor battle's sound
Was heard the world around.

The idle spear and shield were high up hung:
The hooked chariot stood,

Unstain'd with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;
The kings sat still, with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their Sovereign Lord was by."

The Heathen gods depart with weeping and vain lamentation, leaving oblivion to prey upon their empty thrones:

"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 mighty trance or heathen spell

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

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-inwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn.

"Peor and Baaliin

Forsake their temples dim,

With that twice-battered god of Palestine:

And mooned Astaroth,

Heaven's queen and mother both,

Now sits not girt with taper's holy shine!

The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn,

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thumunuz mourn

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That is noble and spirit-stirring poetry. The bass of Heaven's great organ seems to flow in the lines, and slowly and with many echoes the

pass

strain melts into silence. Milton's poem is a prophecy of the triumphs of Christianity. All the Heathen deities, numerous as stars in the Milky Way, will perish in the new dawn. The beautiful divinities of Greece, "the fair humanities of old religion," fled with weeping, and dishevelled locks; and so also, sooner or later, are doomed to depart all other kinds of idolatry-the hundred-armed and hundred-headed divinities of Brahmin, as well as the Mumbo-Jumbo of the African. Believing, as I do, that my own personal decease is not more certain than that the religion of the Saviour will subdue and reign triumphant over the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I my thoughts rapidly over the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. There are the great realms on which the Crescent beams; there are the monstrous idols and subtle philosophic meshes of Hindostan, of quite unknown antiquity, flowing out of the grey dawn and morning light of time; there is the colossal heathenism of China, weighing like night upon its millions; and there is the African's Devil worship and bloody rites. These are to a large extent principalities and powers of darkness with which our religion has never been brought into collision save at trivial and far-separated points, and in these cases the attack has never been made in strength. But what of our own Europe-the home of philosophy, and poetry, and painting? Europe, which has produced Greece, and Rome, and England's centuries of glory; which has been lighted up by the fires of martyrdom; which has heard a Luther preach, and has listened to the song of a Dante and a Milton? What of it? Did not, in the very year which is now dying out in the Christmas snow, the Italian hills hear the battle-thunders of a Magenta? Were not the Italian plains cumbered with the useless carnage of a Solferino? And did not two emperors meet, and breakfast, and chat, and smoke cigars together, and depart, the dearest friends-a hollow friendship, purchased by the agonies of two empires, and at the price of a hundred thousand lives? Woe's me! God's heaven has seldom looked upon a sadder sight than that. And is not the public air which nations breathe at this moment charged with thunder? Despots are plotting, ships are building, man's ingenuity is bent upon the invention and improvement of the instruments of death; Europe is bristling with five millions of bayonets; and this is the condition of the world, for which the Son of God died eighteen hundred and fifty-nine years ago! There is no mystery of Providence so inscrutable as this; and yet, is not the very sense of its mournfulness a proof that the spirit of Christianity is spreading and glowing in the minds of men? For, of a verity, military glory is becoming in our best thoughts a bloody rag, and conquest the first in the catalogue of mighty crimes; and a throned tyrant, with armies, and treasures, and the cheers of a hundred nations, rising up like a cloud of incense around him, but a mark for the thunderbolt of Almighty God-in reality, poorer than a Lazarus stretched at a rich man's gate. Besides, all these evil things are getting to some extent mitigated. Florence Nightingale, a true Sister of Mercy, walks through

the Scutari hospitals, and "poor, noble, wounded and sick men" kiss her shadow as it passes. The Emperor Napoleon III. does not make war to employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for the sake of an "idea." Mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn Emperor knows that, as he knows most things. There can be little doubt that, when the political crimes of kings and governments, the hideous moral sores that fester in the heart of society, and all the "burden of the unintelligible world," weigh heavy on the mind, that we have to thank Christianity for it. Its pure light makes the darkness visible. The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of the nations ghastly. The Divine love makes human hate stand out in dark relief. This sadness, nobler than any joy, is the heritage of the Christian. An ancient Roman could not have felt so. Everything runs on smoothly enough so long as Jove wields the thunder, and Olympus wears the coronet of gods. But Venus, and Mars, and Minerva, are far behind us now; the Cross is before us; and self-denial, and sorrow for sin, and the keeping of the poor, and the succouring of the oppressed, and the cleansing of our own hearts, are duties incumbent upon every one of us.

The Christmas night has fallen upon the world. In this little village the festive parties have dispersed. The lights have gone out in the windows. Midnight from the church tower vibrates on 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 at once the strife and tumult of this little ball, the plotting of its emperors, the marching and countermarching of its armies, all its crowded life of mingled crime and goodness, fade away before the idea of Him who makes visible space His antechamber, and in whose hands are the issues of all things. He knoweth His own purposes, and the ambition of mighty kings but works out His behests.

I have read Milton's "Hymn to the Nativity" to-night; let me, before I sleep, read the Christmas song of another bard-of less majestic force, indeed, than the earlier strain, but more in consonance with our own times, and teaching, in eloquent music, the best aspirations of the best minds :

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