by the high-heapt hearth,
Old winter! seated in thy great armed-chair,
Watching the children at their Christmas mirth;
Or circled by them as thy lips declare
Some merry jest, or tale of murder dire,
Or troubled spirit that disturbs the night;
Pausing at times to rouse the smouldering fire,
Or taste the old October brown and bright.

_Robert Southey._

DECEMBER.

And after him came next the chill December:
Yet he, through merry feasting which he made,
And great bonfires, did not the cold remember;
His Saviour's birth his mind so much did glad:
Upon a shaggy-bearded goat he rode,
The same wherewith Dan Jove in tender years,
They say, was nourisht by th' Idaean Mayd;
And in his hand a broad deep bowle he beares,
Of which he freely drinks an health to all his peeres.

_Edmund Spenser._

CHRISTMAS WEATHER IN SCOTLAND.

A winter day! the feather-silent snow
Thickens the air with strange delight, and lays
A fairy carpet on the barren lea.
No sun, yet all around that inward light
Which is in purity,--a soft moonshine,
The silvery dimness of a happy dream.
How beautiful! afar on moorland ways,
Bosomed by mountains, darkened by huge glens,
(Where the lone altar raised by Druid hands
Stands like a mournful phantom,) hidden clouds
Let fall soft beauty, till each green fir branch
Is plumed and tasselled, till each heather stalk
Is delicately fringed. The sycamores,
Through all their mystical entanglement
Of boughs, are draped with silver. All the green
Of sweet leaves playing with the subtle air
In dainty murmuring; the obstinate drone
Of limber bees that in the monk's-hood bells
House diligent; the imperishable glow
Of summer sunshine never more confessed
The harmony of nature, the divine,
Diffusive spirit of the beautiful.
Out in the snowy dimness, half revealed
Like ghosts in glimpsing moonshine, wildly run
The children in bewildering delight.
There is a living glory in the air,--
A glory in the hushed air, in the soul
A palpitating wonder hushed in awe.

Softly--with delicate softness--as the light
Quickens in the undawned east; and silently--
With definite silence--as the stealing dawn
Dapples the floating clouds, slow fall, slow fall,
With indecisive motion eddying down,
The white-winged flakes,--calm as the sleep of sound,
Dim as a dream. The si