Ballade of Christmas Ghosts.

Be welcome, all, to come or go,

The ghosts we all can raise at will.

Friend, sursum corda, soon or slow

201

We part, like guests who've joyed their fill; Forget them not, nor mourn them so, The ghosts we all can raise at will!

Andrew Lang.

THE VILLAGE CHRISTMAS.

Meantime the village rouses up the fire:
While well attested, and as well believed,
Heard solemn, goes the goblin story round,
Till superstitious horror creeps o'er all.

Or, frequent in the sounding hall, they wake
The rural gambol. Rustic mirth goes round;
The simple joke that takes the shepherd's
heart,

Easily pleased; the long, loud laugh, sincere ; The kiss, snatched hasty from the side-long

maid,

On purpose guardless, or pretending sleep;
The leap, the slap, the haul; and, shook to

notes

Of native music, the respondent dance,
Thus jocund fleets with them the winter-night.

James Thomson.

Winter.

203

WINTER.

A wrinkled, crabbéd man they picture thee,
Old winter, with a rugged beard as gray
As the long moss upon the apple-tree;
Blue-lipt, an ice-drop at thy sharp blue nose,
Close muffled up, and on thy dreary way
Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows.
They should have drawn thee by the high-
heapt hearth,

Old winter! seated in thy great armed-chair, Watching the children at their Christmas mirth;

Or circled by them as thy lips declare
Some merry jest, or tale of murder dire,
Or troubled spirit that disturbs the night;
Pausing at times to rouse the smouldering fire,
Or taste the old October brown and bright.

Robert Southey.

DECEMBER.

And after him came next the chill December:
Yet he, through merry feasting which he made
And great bonfires, did not the cold remember;
His Saviour's birth his mind so much did glad :
Upon a shaggy-bearded goat he rode,

The same wherewith Dan Jove in tender years,
They say, was nourisht by th' Iæan Mayd;
And in his hand a broad deep bowle he beares,
Of which he freely drinks an health to all his

peeres.

Edmund Spenser.

Christmas Weather in Scotland.

205

CHRISTMAS WEATHER IN SCOTLAND.

A winter day! the feather-silent snow
Thickens the air with strange delight, and lays
A fairy carpet on the barren lea.

No sun, yet all around that inward light
Which is in purity,-a soft moonshine,
The silvery dimness of a happy dream.
How beautiful! afar on moorland ways,
Bosomed by mountains, darkened by huge glens,
(Where the lone altar raised by Druid hands
Stands like a mournful phantom,) hidden clouds
Let fall soft beauty, till each green fir branch
Is plumed and tasselled, till each heather stalk
Is delicately fringed. The sycamores,
Through all their mystical entanglement
Of boughs, are draped with silver. All the
green

Of sweet leaves playing with the subtle air
In dainty murmuring; the obstinate drone
Of limber bees that in the monk's-hood bells
House diligent; the imperishable glow
Of summer sunshine never more confessed
The harmony of nature, the divine,
Diffusive spirit of the beautiful.

Out in the snowy dimness, half revealed

Like ghosts in glimpsing moonshine, wildly run