By Edmund Bolton. From England's
Helicon, 1600.

The Shepherd's Song.

A CAROL OR HYMN FOR CHRISTMAS.

WEET music, sweeter far

Than any song is sweet:

Sweet music, heavenly rare,

Mine ears, O peers, doth greet.

You gentle flocks, whose fleeces, pearled with dew,
Resemble heaven, whom golden drops make bright,
Listen, O listen, now, O not to you

Our pipes make sport to shorten weary night:

But voices most divine

Make blissful harmony :

Voices that seem to shine,

For what else clears the sky?

Tunes can we hear, but not the singers see,
The tunes divine, and so the singers be.

Lo, how the firmament

Within an azure fold
The flock of stars hath pent,

That we might them behold

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Yet from their beams proceedeth not this light,
Nor can their christals such reflection give.
What then doth make the element so bright?
The heavens are come down upon earth to live.
But hearken to the song,

Glory to glory's king,

And peace all men among,

These quiristers do sing.

Angels they are, as also (Shepherds) he
Whom in our fear we do admire to see.

Let not amazement blind

Your souls, said he, annoy :

To you and all mankind

My message bringeth joy.

For lo, the world's great Shepherd now is born,
A blessed babe, an infant full of power:
After long night uprisen is the morn,
Renowning Bethl'em in the Saviour.

Sprung is the perfect day,

By prophets seen afar:
Sprung is the mirthful May,

Which winter cannot mar.

In David's city doth this sun appear

Clouded in flesh, yet, shepherds, sit we here?

By Ben Jonson.

A bymn on the Mativity of my Saviour.

I

SING the birth was born to-night,

The author both of life and light;
The angels so did sound it.
And like the ravished shepherds said,
Who saw the light, and were afraid,
Yet searched, and true they found it.

The Son of God, th' eternal king,
That did us all salvation bring,

And freed the soul from danger;

He whom the whole world could not take,
The Word, which heaven and earth did make,
Was now laid in a manger.

The Father's wisdom willed it so,
The Son's obedience knew no No,

Both wills were in one stature;
And as that wisdom had decreed,
The Word was now made flesh indeed,

And took on him our nature.

What comfort by him do we win,
Who made himself the price of sin,
To make us heirs of glory!
To see this babe all innocence;
A martyr born in our defence:

Can man forget the story?

From Richard Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. The text of ed. 1648 is followed.

A hymn of the Nativity.

SUNG AS BY THE SHEPHERDS.

Chorus. COME we shepherds whose blest sight

Hath met Love's noon in Nature's night;

Come, lift we up our loftier song,

And wake the sun that lies too long.

To all our world of well-stol'n joy,

He slept and dreamt of no such thing,
While we found out heaven's fairer eye
And kist the cradle of our King;
Tell him he rises now too late
To show us ought worth looking at.

Tell him we now can show him more

Than e'er he showed to mortal sight,
Than he himself e'er saw before,

Which to be seen needs not his light.
Tell him, Tityrus, where th' hast been,
Tell him, Thyrsis, what th' hast seen.