mary, and holly boughs cut upon the
hillside, and crab-apples bobbing in the wassail bowl, and masques
and mummers, and dancers on the rushes, that we need not here
describe a Christmas Eve in olden times. Indeed, this last half of
the nineteenth century is weary of the worn-out theme. But one
characteristic of the age of Elizabeth may be mentioned: that is its
love of music. Fugued melodies, sung by voices without instruments,
were much in vogue. We call them madrigals, and their half-merry,
half-melancholy music yet recalls the time when England had her gift
of art, when she needed not to borrow of Marenzio and Palestrina,
when her Wilbyes and her Morlands and her Dowlands won the praise of
Shakspere and the court. We hear the echo of those songs; and in
some towns at Christmas or the New Year old madrigals still sound in
praise of Oriana and of Phyllis and the country life. What are
called 'waits' are but a poor travesty of those well-sung
Elizabethan carols. We turn in our beds half pitying, half angered
by harsh voices that quaver senseless ditties in the fog, or by
tuneless fiddles playing popular airs without propriety or interest.

It is a strange mixture of picturesquely blended elements which the
Elizabethan age presents. We see it afar off like the meeting of a
hundred streams that grow into a river. We are sailing on the flood
long after it has shrunk into a single tide, and the banks are dull
and tame, and the all-absorbing ocean is before us. Yet sometimes we
hear a murmur of the distant fountains, and Christmas is a day on
which for some the many waters of the age of great Elizabeth sound
clearest.

The age which followed was not poetical. The Puritans restrained
festivity and art, and hated music. Yet from this period stands out
the hymn of Milton, written when he was a youth, but bearing promise
of his later muse. At one time, as we read it, we seem to be looking
on a picture by some old Italian artist. But no picture can give
Milton's music or make the 'base of heaven's deep organ blow.' Here
he touches new associations, and reveals the realm of poetry which
it remains for later times to traverse. Milton felt the true
sentiment of Northern Christmas when he opened his poem with the
'winter wild,' in defiance of historical probability and what the
French call local colouring. Nothing shows how wholly we people of
the North have appropriated Christmas, and made it a creature of our
own imagination, mo