Soft and easy is thy cradle; Coarse and hard thy Saviour lay. When His birthplace was a stable, And His softest bed was hay. * * * * * Lo He slumbers in His manger Where the horned oxen fed; --Peace, my darling, here's no danger; Here's no ox a-near thy bed."{45} It is to the eighteenth century that the three most popular of English Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate's "While shepherds watched their flocks by night"--one of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms) in common use in the Anglican Church before the nineteenth century--is a bald and apparently artless paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some accident, has attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and noble tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley's "Hark, the herald angels sing," or--as it should be--"Hark, how all the welkin rings," is much admired by some, but to the present writer seems a mere piece of theological rhetoric. Byrom's "Christians, awake, salute the happy morn," has the stiffness and formality or its period, but it is not without a certain quaintness and dignity. One could hardly expect fine Christmas poetry of an age whose religion was on the one hand staid, rational, unimaginative, and on the other "Evangelical" in the narrow sense, finding its centre in the Atonement rather than the Incarnation. The revived mediaevalism, religious and aesthetic, of the nineteenth century, produced a number of Christmas carols. Some, like Swinburne's "Three damsels in the queen's chamber," with |85| its exquisite verbal music and delightful colour, and William Morris's less successful "Masters, in this hall," and "Outlanders, whence come ye last?" are the work of unbelievers and bear witness only to the aesthetic charm of the Christmas story; but there are others, mostly from Roman or Anglo-Catholic sources, of real religious inspiration.[34] The most spontaneous are Christina Rossetti's, whose haunting rhythms and delicate feeling are shown at their best in her songs of the Christ Child. More studied and self-conscious are the austere Christmas verses of Lionel Johnson and the graceful carols of Professor Selwyn Image. In one poem Mr. Image strikes a deeper and stronger note than elsewhere; its solemn music takes us back to an earlier century:-- "Consider, O my soul, what morn is this! Whereon the eternal Lord of all things made, For us, poor mortals, and our endless bliss, Came down from heaven; and, in a manger laid, The first, rich, offerings of our ransom paid: Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!"{46}