LONGFELLOW. The dark winter months, with their alternate snows, sheeting the wide moorlands, and roofing the mighty mountain-tops of the lake country with inviolate white, and soft thaws swelling the streamlets into torrents, inundating the grassy meadows, and converting the mountain tarns into inland seas, had passed away; nor passed away all gloomily, or without their appropriate and peculiar pleasures, from the sojourners in Hawkshead Castle. All over Merrie England, but in no part of it more than in the north country, was Christmas the gladdest and the blythest time of all the circling year; when every door stood open, from that of the baron's castle and the franklin's hall to that of the poorest cotter's cabin; when the yule log was kindled, and the yule candle lighted; when the furmety smoked on every English board, and the wassail bowl was spiced for all comers; when the waits sang Christmas carols under the clear cold moon in the frosty midnights, and the morris-dancers and the mummers rioted and reveled to the rude minstrelsy of the time, and made the most of the short-lived wintery sunshine; when ancient feuds were often reconciled, and ancient friendships riveted by closer ties; when families long dissevered were re-collected and re-united about the old ancestral hearth-stones; when the noble and the rich filled their abundant halls with sumptuous luxury and loud-rejoicing merriment, and the poor were not forgotten by the great. Indeed, though there was much that was coarse and rude, much that was hard, cruel, and oppressive, in the social life of England, in those old and almost forgotten days, there was much also that was good and generous and genial, much that was sound and hearty, much that was brave and hale and masculine, which has vanished and departed from the world forever, with the vaunted progress of civilization and refinement, In those old times When the Christmas chimes Were a merry sound to hear, When the squire's wide hall, And the cottage small, Were full of good English cheer. Above all, there was this great redeeming virtue, conspicuous among the flagrant wrongs and innate evils of society under the feudal system, that between the governors and the governed, between the lord and his lieges, nay, even between the master and his serfs, there was then no such social gulf established, as now yawns, in these boasted days of civilizing progress and political equality, between castes and classes, separated by little else than their worth, estimated by the standard of gold--gold, which seems, daily and hourly, more and more to be over-riding all distinctions of honored ancestry, high name, noble deeds, personal deserts, nay, even of distinguished bearing, of intellect, of education, of accomplishment, much more of truth, integrity or honor.