Awake, glad heart! get up and sing! It is the Birthday of thy King. Awake! awake! The sun doth shake Light from his locks, and, all the way Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day. Awake! awake! hark how th' wood rings, Winds whisper, and the busy springs A concert make! Awake! awake! Man is their high-priest, and should rise To offer up the sacrifice. I would I were some bird, or star, Fluttering in woods, or lifted far Above this inn, And road of sin! Then either star or bird should be Shining or singing still to thee. I would I had in my best part Fit rooms for thee! or that my heart Where so clean as Thy manger was! But I am all filth, and obscene; Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean. Sweet Jesu! will then. Let no more This leper haunt and soil thy door! Cure him, ease him, O release him! And let once more, by mystic birth, The Lord of life be born in earth. * * * * * CHRISTMAS DREAMS CHRISTOPHER NORTH To-morrow is Merry Christmas; and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the light sounds of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy walls--and sleep now reigning over all the house save this one room, will be banished far over the sea--and morning will be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies. Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration, painted according to nature--what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a sameness would pervade them all--but only that kind of sameness that pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon and some stars--a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few castellated, clouds? yet no two nights ever bore more than a family resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that illumine those skies--and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.