Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1876 — Poems and Carols of Winter. [ARTICLE]

Poems and Carols of Winter.

“ It was the winter wild, While the heaven-born Child, All meanly wrapped, in the rude manger lies.” Sweeter carols than bird ever sang usher in the wintry weather. The poem of childhood was chanted by angels on the hills of Palestine eighteen hundred years ago, and its meaning has been deepening in the hearts of Christian men and women ever since. Dear children, the secret of true poetry, as well as of all other true things, lies hiddeh in the heart of the Babe of Bethlehem —tire secret of heavenly love, without which there is no beauty in the works or words of men. “Peace on earth, good will to man I” is the hymn which must be sung in the heart before any poem worth keeping can be written. Is it not beautiful that when the flowers of the wood and field have donb blossoming, when the trees are leafeless, and no binis make melody among the barren boughs, the whele world breaks out into singing over the cradle of its dearest' Child? Some of the Christmas carols are as simple as nursery-songs, and rude as the ages in which they began to be sung, when Christianity itself was in its childhood. The wassail-cups and yule-fires of the old Saxons were often strangely mixed up with the tender and sacred birthday-story of the New Testament. There are others which, through their very simplicity, carry us back to the hills where the watching shepherds listened to the song of the angels, so many centuries ago, so that we hear with them the first notes of that celestial anthem whose echo will never die away from the earth. — Lucy Larcom, in St. Nicholas for December.