"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world--and all under it, too, when their time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot--shining companies and groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them! "He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition. "The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep 'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these small school-going children of the dawn.' . . . "What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn." My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly, stringent in our cheerful ritual;--and this has been my birthday sermon! DECEMBER.