As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear, Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed, As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed; Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats I frye, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls, For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good, So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood: With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day. Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell’s poetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem “S. Peter’s Complaint,” consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems—“Times go by Turns,” “Content and Rich,”[30] “Life is but Loss,” “Look Home,” “Love’s servile Lot,” and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart’s estimate of them. “The hastiest reader will come on ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally), is throughout of the ‘pure well of English undefiled.’ When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, their _élan_, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the ‘dew of the morning.’ His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the ‘Vale of Tears’ the source of the latter’s immortal ‘Haunted House’—dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or