When such music sweet their hearts and ears did greet, The air, such pleasure loth to lose, With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close. If ye 13. Ring out, ye crystal spheres, have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the bass of Heaven's deep organ blow; Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. 14. For, if such holy song Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold; Will sicken soon and die, And lěprous Sin will melt from earthly mold; And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. VII. 100. HYMN TO THE NATIVITY. PART SECOND. EA, Truth and Justice then YWill down return to men, Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing, Throned in celestial sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering; Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall. 2. But wisest Fate says no, This must not yet be so; The babe yet lies in smiling infancy, That on the bitter cross Must redeem our loss, So both himself and us to glorify. Yet first, to those enchained in sleep, The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep, 3. With such a horrid clang As on Mount Sinaï rang, While the red fire and smould'ring clouds outbrake: With terror of that blast, Shall from the surface to the center shake; The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne. 4. And then at last our bliss, But now begins; for, from this happy day, In straiter limits bound, Not half so far casts his usurped sway; 5. The oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving, 6. The lonely mountains ō'er, And the resounding shōre, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; The parting Genius is with sighing sent; The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. 7. In consecrated earth, 1 Apollo, one of the principal gods of Grecian mythology. Homer represents him as a revealer of the future, a function which he exercised especially at the temple of Delphi. The Lars' and Lēmūres mourn with midnight plaint. In urns and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens' at their service quaint; While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat. Forsake their temples dim With that twice-battered god of Palestine; Heaven's queen and mother bōth, Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine; 5 The Libyac Hammon shrinks his horn; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz' mourn. 9. And sullen Moloch," fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue: In dismal dance about the furnace blue: In Memphian grove or green, 1 Lar (lår), plural la' rēz, though here pronounced lårz, a household deity among the Romans, regarded as the soul of a deceased ancestor. 2 Lěm' ū rēš, though here pronounced lē mūrz, spirits or ghosts of the departed; specters. 3 Fla' men, a priest devoted to the service of one particular god. 4 Peor and Baalim, from Bääl, a Chaldean god, worshiped extensivcly in antiquity, even by the Israelites. Baäl, the male deity, was worshiped as the sun, and Ashtoreth, or Astarte, as the moon or queen of night." 66 5 6 Hăm mon, same as Ammon, an ancient god usually represented in the form of a ram, or a human being with the head of a ram. 6 Thăm’muz, an ancient Syrian deity in honor of whom the idolatresses held an annual lamentation; the same with the Phenician Adonis. 8 'Mō' loch, the deity of the Ammonites to whom human sacrifices were offered in the valley of Tophet. O si ris, one of the three deities to whom supreme honor was paid in ancient Egypt. The originator of civilization, in a contest with Typhon, or evil, he was slain and his dead body fitted into a chest, thrown into the Nile, and swept out to sea. |