Chiefly for the sake of its beauty, I give the last passage of a poem written upon occasion of the feasts of the Annunciation and the Resurrection falling on the same day. Let faithful souls this double feast attend In two processions. Let the first descend The temple's stairs, and with a downcast eye Upon the lowest pavement prostrate lie: In creeping violets, white lilies, shine Their humble thoughts and every pure design. The other troop shall climb, with sacred heat, The rich degrees of Solomon's bright seat: _steps_ In glowing roses fervent zeal they bear, And in the azure flower-de-lis appear Celestial contemplations, which aspire Above the sky, up to the immortal choir. William Drummond of Hawthornden, a Scotchman, born in 1585, may almost be looked upon as the harbinger of a fresh outburst of word-music. No doubt all the great poets have now and then broken forth in lyrical jubilation. Ponderous Ben Jonson himself, when he takes to song, will sing in the joy of the very sound; but great men have always so much graver work to do, that they comparatively seldom indulge in this kind of melody. Drummond excels in madrigals, or canzonets--baby-odes or songs--which have more of wing and less of thought than sonnets. Through the greater part of his verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from the rain-shower,--never does break out clear, but remains a suggested, etherially vanishing tone. His is a _voix voilée_, or veiled voice of song. It is true that in the time we are now approaching far more attention was paid not merely to the smoothness but to the melody of verse than any except the great masters had paid before; but some are at the door, who, not being great masters, yet do their inferior part nearly as well as they their higher, uttering a music of marvellous and individual sweetness, which no mere musical care could secure, but which springs essentially from music in the thought gathering to itself musical words in melodious division, and thus fashioning for itself a fitting body. The melody of their verse is all their own--as original as the greatest art-forms of the masters. Of Drummond, then, here are two sonnets on the Nativity; the first spoken by the angels, the second by the shepherds. _The Angels_.