Christmas and the Poets
Ring out, ye Crystall Sphears.
Once bless our human ears
(If ye have power to touch our senses so,);
And let your stiver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the Bass of Heav'ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th' Angelike symphony.
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould—
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolourous mansions to the peering day.
Through the majestic colonnade of Milton's ode we walk with bowed heads and muted instruments in this year of grace 1915. What can be said for a world whose nineteen-hundred-and-sixteenth Christmas dawns to the roar of guns, a world which in nearly two thousand years of vaunted loyalty to the Prince of Peace has not yet molded its age of gold out of the refractory ore of races and nations? What can be said for a world which, with nothing to do but be happy in the use of its own riches and the contemplation of its own beauty, prefers to divert those riches to agony and luxury, and to destroy that beauty and pervert that happiness, through unjust laws and ingenious devices and distorted ideals?
It may be well to emphasize the command toward love and peace in the annual festival. "Men must come to it—they
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