word should all be forgotten and forgiven beside the manger in which the Saviour lay, and amid the music which the angels sung. At such a season it becomes us to leave for a little the low levels of this life's interests, and to ascend in aspiration, if not in fact, to that sunny table-land which neither the clouds nor the tides of Time can touch. Breathing thus a purer atmosphere, we can look down and see more accurately how transient are the things that most occupy our thoughts, and how weighty and lasting are the themes and thoughts and events which Christmas Day brings within our horizon. There will be ever on that day many sweet, and some very sad, home-scenes, in which merry Christmas feelings will be tempered by sorrowful reminiscences. Faces so happy that the door opened almost of its own accord to admit them have passed away into the shadow of death; voices that used to sound so musical are hushed in the silence of the grave; forms once so welcome and familiar have fled like shadows from the dial-plate of Time; footfalls that used to start a thousand welcomes will no more echo in the deserted hall, and the chair that is a family history and heirloom is no more occupied. These recollections will solemnize what other thoughts will sweeten. Changes of another kind will also appear on the pages of memory in the light of a Christmas fire. Poverty, long in pursuit, has at length come up with some. Youth has ripened into manhood, and brows once smooth are covered with grooves and wrinkles, like the brown sea-sand from which the tide of life is ebbing. It is on such occasions that the words of the poet Campbell occur, and give just expression to human experience : "The more we live, more brief appear A day to childhood seems a year, "When joys have lost their bloom and breath, Why, as we reach the falls of death, Feel we its tide more rapid ? Heaven gives our years of fading strength, Indemnifying fleetness: And those of youth a seeming length, Next to the sanctuary home rises up amid the light and shadows of Christmas as the most beautiful and blessed association. The French have no word for our English home; and many of that interesting nation have little corresponding to the thing. "Home," says a French traveller, "is the centre of the entire existence of the English. It is the stronghold of their fortune, their family, and their liberty." Home at Christmas time is the reunion and gathering together of the far-spreading branches that together form the Christmas-tree. It is the spring of those living streams that freshen the waste places alike of the individual heart and the collective community. It forms the retreat of troubled hearts, the scene of forgiven and forgotten wrongs-the quiet and sheltered bay into which the surf and spray of this world's controversies and perplexities are not suffered to roll. It is the Englishman's refuge. Touching this holiest spot of Mother Earth, he renews his strength and rekindles at its hearth cold hopes and joys that help him manfully to enter on the arena and fight nobly, if not always with success, life's hard battles. merry Christmas. From the very heart we wish all a May its sun rise on many glad households, and set on none that are not wiser and better and happier for Christmas-day! May it be in many a manly soul the Lethe of all that is painful, and the pledge and earnest and prophecy of that blessed home whose hearth-stone shall never grow cold, and the roof-tree of which shall never be shaken down! TRUE poetess has recently passed from the region of material things into the realm. of everlasting sunshine. The dreams of time have become to her the realities of eternity. She now lives amid the splendours of a day from which she drew down many a brilliant vision that illuminated the night, and beautified the rugged scenes of this world. She has left on earth the restraints and trammels of the soaring spirit, not its capacities and powers. In this life language is often suggestive of thoughts that come only in fragments within the horizon of the mind. In the higher life, it is the perfect representative of thoughts too magnificent ever to be realized here, and laden with these, it there ebbs into truly poetic and perfect expression. The poet works in chains in this world. Gleams only of the infinite break at intervals on the shores of his soul VOL. I. D Having gone He stands face to He sees at best through a glass darkly. up higher, he sees as he is seen. face with all that is bright, and pure, and true, in that grand apocalypse of light, and glory, and loveliness. Mrs. Barrett Browning's poetry takes a very high place in the estimate of all who have carefully studied the beautiful creations of her genius. Her thoughts are often obscure, but always grand. Her language is compressed and vigorous. Her themes are happily chosen, and artistically worked out. Her communion as a poetess is rather with the past than the present, and with the upper oftener than with the lower world. Her works are, therefore, the admiration of the contemplative and thoughtful, who seek a higher nutriment than can be gathered from common fields, and love to hold communion with the beautiful, the suggestive, and the sublime. Two of her noblest smaller poems are entitled, "Crowned and Wedded," and "Crowned and Buried." The former sings the coronation and wedding of Queen Victoria, in strains worthy of the festive and joyous occasion, closing with an advice to Prince Albert, which he faithfully followed : 66 Count that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring, The latter is a graphic and poetic portrait of Napoleon. There is a hue of sorrow tinging almost all the poetry of Elizabeth Browning. It is not a morbid melancholy, such as marks the productions of the disappointed, the peevish, and the jealous. It is rather the melancholy that is inseparable from great genius, resulting from the struggle of the higher life within against the limitations and restrictions of its condition. |