ABOUT AND ROUND ABOUT (continued 2)

114. "King Pandion he is dead."

A wild and dreadful legend is hidden here—of a King who wronged his Queen and her sister, daughters of Pandion, and how they avenged themselves upon him, sacrificing his son to their hatred. That Queen, goes this old tale, became a nightingale, her sister a swallow (crimson still dying the feathers of her throat), the evil king a hoopoe, and the firstborn was raised to life again a pheasant.

115. "A Sparhawk Proud"

—a little bird but of a noble family. Listen, at least, to Auceps, the Faulkner or Falconer, in "The Compleat Angler." [I have inserted a few full stops in a sentence that has none] " ... And first, for the Element that I use to trade in, which is the Air, an Element of more worth than weight, an Element that doubtless exceeds both the Earth and Water; for though I sometimes deal in both; yet the Air is most properly mine, I and my Hawks use that most, and it yields us most recreation. It stops not the high soaring of my noble generous Falcon; in it she ascends to such an height, as the dull eyes of beasts and fish are not able to reach to; their bodies are too gross for such high elevations. In the Air my troops of Hawks soar up on high, and when they are lost in the sight of men, then they attend upon and converse with the gods, therefore I think my Eagle is so justly styled, Joves servant in Ordinary. And that very Falcon, that I am now going to see, deserves no meaner a title, for she usually in her flight endangers her self, (like the son of Daedalus), to have her wings scorched by the Suns heat, she flyes so near it. But her mettle makes her careless of danger, for she then heeds nothing, but makes her nimble Pinions cut the fluid air, and so makes her high way over the steepest mountains and deepest rivers, and in her glorious carere looks with contempt upon those high Steeples and magnificent Palaces which we adore and wonder at; from which height I can make her to descend by a word from my mouth (which she both knows and obeys), to accept of meat from my hand, to own me for her Master, to go home with me, and be willing the next day to afford me the like recreation...."

120. "Come Wary One."

When I was a child of eight or nine I had a kind of passion for sparrows, and used to set traps for them; but even if I succeeded in taking one alive, which was not always, I could never persuade it to live in a cage above a day or two, however much I pampered it. It drooped and died. Then, like a young crocodile, I occasionally shed tears. One fine morning, I remember, I visited a distant trap and, as usual, all but stopped breathing at discovering that it was "down." Very cautiously edging in my fingers towards the captive, I was startled out of my wits by a sudden prodigious skirring of wings, and lo and behold, I had caught—and lost—a starling. He fled away twenty yards or so, and perched on a hillock. I see him now, his feathers glistening in the sun, and his sharp head turned towards me, his eyes looking back at me, as if foe at foe. And that reminds me of the Griffons—the guardians of the mines of the one-eyed Arimaspians.

" ... From that land go men toward the land of Bacharie, where be full evil folk and full cruel.... In that country be many griffounes, more plentiful than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle, and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth that they be of that shape. But a griffoun hath the body more great, and is more strong, than eight lions, of such lions as be on this side of the world; and larger and stronger than an hundred eagles, such as we have amongst us. For a griffoun there will bear flying to his nest a great horse, if he may find him handy, or two oxen yoked together, as they go at the plough. For he hath his talons so long and so broad and great upon his feet, as though they were homes of great oxen, or of bugles (bullocks), or of kine; so that men make cups of them, to drink out of. And of their ribs, and the quills of their wings, men make bows full strong, to shoot with arrows and bow-bolts...."

But a griffoun is only a gigantic starling, so to speak; and it's a pity mine and I were enemies. "If a sparrow come before my window," wrote John Keats in one of his letters, "I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel." Brick-traps are little help in this.

The men who wrote these words, truly and solemnly meant them. They are not mere pretty flowers of the fancy, but the tough piercing roots of the tree of life that grew within their minds.

126. "Come unto these Yellow Sands."

This poem and many others I copied out of Mr. Nahum's book in their original spelling. At first I found the reading of some of them very troublesome. It was like looking at a dried-up flower or beetle. But there the things were; and after a good deal of trouble I not only began to read them more easily, but grew to like them thus for their own sake. First, because this was as they were actually written, before our English printers agreed to spell alike; and next, because the old words with their look of age became a pleasure to me in themselves. It was like watching the dried-up flower or beetle actually and as if by a magic of the mind coming to life. Besides, many of Shakespeare's small poems were already known to me. It touched them with newness to see them (though indeed he never so saw them), as they appeared (seven years after his death), in the pages of the famous folio volume of his Plays that was printed in 1623 by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount.

Not only that; for it is curious too to see how in the old days English was constantly changing—its faded words falling like dead leaves from a tree, and new ones appearing. In a book which William Caxton printed as far back even as 1490, he says: "And certainly our language now used varieth far from that which was used and spoken when I was born. For we Englishmen be born under the domination of the moon, which is never steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season and waneth and decreaseth another season." So in our own day words, like human beings, come into the world and pass away: and many gradually change their meanings.

For if the spelling of a word alters its effect on the eye, it must also affect the mind of the reader; and I must confess that "my lovynge deare," looks to me to tell of somebody more lovable even than "my loving dear." And what about shoogar-plummes, cleere greye eies, the murrkie fogghe, the moones enravysshynge?

And what about—

Not that I have always kept to the old spellings. I have followed my fancy; and if anyone would like to see an old poem in its first looks that is here printed in our own way, all he need do is to go back to the book in which it first appeared.

128. "Shee carries Me above the Skie."

129. "Who Calls?"

133. "For Fear of Little Men."

"Terrestrial devils," says Robert Burton, "are those Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows, Trulli, etc., which as they are most conversant with men, so they do them most harm.... These are they that dance on heaths and greens ... and leave that green circle, which we commonly find in plain fields, which others hold to proceed from a meteor falling, or some accidental rankness of the ground, so nature sports herself; they are sometimes seen by old women and children.... Paracelsus reckons up many places in Germany, where they do usually walk in little coats, some two feet long. A bigger kind there is of them called with us hobgoblins, and Robin Goodfellows, that would in those superstitious times grind corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work. They would mend old irons in those Aeolian isles of Lipari, in former ages, and have been often seen and heard.... Dithmarus Bleskenius, in his description of Iceland, reports for a certainty, that almost in every family they have yet some such familiar spirits.... Another sort of these there are, which frequent forlorn houses.... They will make strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains, shave men, open doors and shut them, fling down platters, stools, chests, sometimes appear in the likeness of hares, crows, black dogs, etc." ...

135.

So too with Hazel Dorn, in the following poem by Mr. Bernard Sleigh, who has most kindly allowed me to print it here for the first time.

In the small hours of Beltane or May Day, vast fires have been wont to be kindled on the hills of the Highlands—a custom old as the Druids. Mr. Gilbert Sheldon tells me that as lately as 1899 he saw the hills round Glengariff ablaze with them. They must be set aflame with what is called need-fire. And need-fire is made by nine men twisting a wimble of wood in a balk of oak until the friction makes sparks fly. With these they ignite dry agaric, a fungus that grows on birch-trees, and soon the blaze is reddening the countryside under the night-sky. Need-fire in a window-nook or carried in a lantern is—like iron—an invincible defence against witches and witchcraft. Beltane cakes—to be eaten whilst squatting on the hills, or dancing and watching the fire—are made out of a caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal and milk.

"No Rowan in her Hair."

So potent is the flower or berry or wood of the rowan or witchwood or quicken or whicken-tree or mountain ash against the wiles of the elf-folk, that dairymaids use it for cream-stirrers and cowherds for a switch.

136. "True Thomas."

There are four copies in handwriting—two of them written about 1450—of a rhymed romance telling how Thomas in his youth, while dreaming daydreams under the Eildon Tree, was met and greeted by the Queen of fair Elfland. The ballad on p. 127 has been passed on from mouth to mouth.

Up to our own grandmothers' day, at least, this Thomas Rhymour of Ercildoune—a village nor far distant from where the Leader joins the Tweed—was famous as a Wise One and a Seer (a See-er—with the inward eye). He lived seven centuries ago, between 1210 and 1297. Years after he had returned from Elfland—as the ballad tells—while he sat feasting in his Castle, news was brought to him that a hart and a hind, having issued out of the forest, were to be seen stepping fair and softly down the stony street of the town, to the marvel of the people. At this, Thomas at once rose from among his guests; left the table; made down to the street; followed after these strange summoners: and was seen again no more.

"Ilka tett," line 7, means every twist or plait; a "fairlie," stanza II, is a wonder, mystery, marvel; and the "coat" in the last stanza, being of "even cloth," was finer than the finest napless damask.

So, too, Young Tamlane, when a boy "just turned of nine," was carried off by the Elfin Queen:

He seems to have been an outlandish and unhuman creature—if this next rhyme tells of him truly (gait, meaning road; pin, (?) knife; coft, bought; moss, peat-bog; and boonmost—you can guess):

138. "Sabrina."

This song is from "Comus," a masque written by Milton for the entertainment of the Earl of Bridgewater, lord lieutenant of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in 1634. That Castle's Hall is now open to the sky—"the lightning shines there; snow burdens the ivy." From a neighbouring room the two princes, Edward V. and his brother, went to their dark death in the Tower. Below the ruinous Castle flow together the Terne and the Corve, on their way to the great Severn—of which Sabrina, the daughter of Estrildis, is the Nymph, she having been drowned in its waters by Guendolen, the jealous queen of Locrine the son of Brut. Estrildis herself, the daughter of King Humber, "so farre excelled in bewtie, that none was then lightly found unto her comparable, for her skin was so whyte that scarcely the fynest kind of Ivorie that might be found, nor the snowe lately fallen downe from the Elament, nor the Lylles did passe the same."

Milton's poems—Lycidas, for instance—frequently resemble bunches of keys, each one of them fitting the lock of some ancient myth or legend. In the lines I have omitted from No. 138 are many such locks awaiting the reader—a reference to the following tale of Glaucus, for example:

There is a secret herb which, if nibbled by fish already gasping to death in our air, gives them the power and cunning to slip back through the grasses into their waters again. Of this herb Glaucus tasted, and instantly his eyes dazzled in desire to share their green transparent deeps. Whereupon the laughing divinities of the rivers gave him sea-green hair, sleeking the stream, fins and a fish's tail, and feasted him merrily. His story is told by Keats in the third book of his Endymion, while Leucothea's, another reference, is to be found in the fifth of the Odyssey. As for the Sirens, here is the counsel Circe gave Ulysses, the while his seamen lay asleep the night after they had returned in safety from Pluto's dismal mansions:

139.

These Songs are from the last act of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"—the Duke and his guests are retired, and now sleep far from Life's Play; and Puck and the fairies are abroad in his palace.

"I am sent with Broome before."

But when the Puritans came in, it seems, the fairies fled away. And Richard Corbet bewailed their exile:

For times change, and with them changes the direction of man's imagination. He turns his questing thoughts now this way, now that; and though our learned dictionaries may maintain that fairy rings are but brighter circles in green grass formed by "certain fungi, especially marasmius oreades"—who knows?—

After all, Geoffrey Chaucer, even in his distant day, lamented that England was bereft of the Silent Folk. Whisper, and they will return—bringing with them Prince Oberon, who "is of heyght but of III fote, and crokyd shulderyd.... And yf ye speke to hym, ye are lost for ever."

140. "Awm. 'Who feasts tonight?'"

Another mere fragment—from p. 182 of Mr. C. M. Doughty's Play, entitled The Cliffs. For the complete "feast" bestowed on the world by this great traveller and poet, the reader must seek out not only this volume, but his Arabia Deserta, and his Dawn in Britain.

"All in Their Watchet Cloaks." (line 15)

141. A Hunt's-up

was in old days the Tally-ho blared at daybreak to rouse the chase.

These are two of the seven stanzas of a song richly larded with Shakesperean allusions, to be found in The Diary of Master William Silence.

In his book on English Poesy, Puttenham, who was born about 1520, says that a poet of the name of Gray won the esteem of Henry VIII. and the Duke of Somerset for "making certeine merry ballades, whereof one chiefly was, 'the hunte is up, the hunte is up." Henry VIII., moreover, was himself a versifier, and a musician, though, as I have read, a dull one. Here is the first stanza of one of his poems:

which, with another equally surprising in sentiment, may be found in full in that casket of antiquities, "Early English Lyrics, chosen by E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick."

143. "With his Coat so gray."

"D'ye ken that a Fox with his last Breath cursed them all as he died in the Morning."

"'Hearken, Reynard, to my words,' (went on the King of Beasts). 'To-day you shall answer with your life for these sins you have committed.' ... 'But nay, my lord,' (sighed the fox), 'I am innocent of all these things. Your Majesty is great and mighty; I meagre and weak. If it is the King's pleasure to kill me, I must die, for whether justly or unjustly, I am your servant; my only strength is in your justice and mercy. To these I appeal, as none has yet appealed in vain. Yea, if it be your Majesty's will that I shall die, then do I accept it humbly. I say no more. But yet I cannot think it a worthy thing for so great a King to wreak his vengeance upon a subject so small.'"

148. "A Fulle Fayre Tyme."

What wonder May was welcome in medieval days—after the long winters and the black cold nights when roads were all but impassable, and men, "despisinge schetes" and nightgear, went to their naked beds with nought but the stars or a dip for candle and maybe their own bones and a scatter of straw for warmth. Is not "Loud sing Cuckoo!" our oldest song?

149. "Lubber Breeze."

I suppose, is the prevalent wind in Lubberland or Cocaigne, where "the pigs run about ready roasted, and cry, Come eat me!"

And here is a picture of another land of mill, that once long ago sang to its waters, and dreamed above its image in the weir:

150. "The Ample Heaven."

"The Time sa Tranquil is and Still." (line 13)

153. "O for a Booke."

Nor—says John Bunyan:

On the other hand;

So much for the reader, but the writer, too, may fall under discouragement. Listen to Colum Cille, an Irish scribe of the eleventh century, in yet another translation from the Gaelic:

But to come back to the reader in his shadie nooke:

As for "the streete cryes all about": according to London Lickpenny, among the street-cries in the fifteenth century were: Hot Pease! Hot Fine Oatcakes! Whitings maids, Whitings! Have you any old boots? Buy a mat! New Brooms, green brooms! with a general hullabaloo of What d'ye lack? and now and again a bawling of Clubs! to summon the tag, rag, and bobtail to a row.

Of singing cries, we may still hear in the sunny summer London streets such sweet and doleful strains as Won't you buy my sweet blooming lavender: Sixteen branches a penny! and in the dusks of November the muffin-man's bell. Besides these, we have Rag-a'-bone! Milk-o! Any scissors to grind? Clo' props! Water-creeses! and, as I remember years ago,

155. "With Hey! with How! with Hoy."

In Rustic Speech and Folk Lore Mrs. Wright gives the decoys with which the country people all over England beguile their beasts and poultry into "shippon, sty, or pen"; or holla them on their way, but much, I have found, depends on him who hollas!

For Cows: Coop! Cush, cush!—while the milkmaid calls—Hoaf! Hobe! Mull! Proo! Proochy! Prut!

For Calves: Moddie! Mog, mog, mog! Pui-ho! Sook, sook!

For Sheep: Co-hobe! Ovey!

For Pigs: Check-check! Cheat! Dack, dack! Giss! or Gissy! Lix! Ric-sic! Shug, shug, shug! Tantassa, tantassa pig, tow a row, a row! Tig, tig, tig!

For Turkeys: Cobbler! Peet, peet, peet! Pen! Pur, pur, pur!

For Geese: Fly-laig! Gag, gag, gag! Ob-ee! White-hoddy!

For Ducks: Bid, bid, bid! Diddle! Dill, dill! Wid! Wheetie!

For Pigeons: Pees! Pod!

And for Rabbits: Map!

"Yea, and I do vow unto thee," said the voice of the beautiful virgin speaking out of the rock; "Call unto them but in their own names and language, and the strong and delicate creatures of the countries of the mind will flock into the living field of thy vision, and above the waters will befall the secret singing of birds, and thou shalt be a pilgrim. Mark how intense a shadow dwells upon this stone! Therein too lurk marvels to be seen." The voice ceased, and I heard nothing but the tapping of a fragment of dry lichen which in the draught of the hot air caused by the burning sunlight stirred between rock and sand. And I cried, "O unfortunate one, I thirst!"

156. "Lavender's blue."

"A poor thing," as Audrey says, but homely and melodious and once somebody's own: such a somebody as inscribed on the walls of Burford Church:

159. "There is a Garden in her Face."

Thomas Campion was "borne upon Ash Weddensday being the twelft day of February. An. Rg. Eliz. nono"—1567. He had one sister, Rose. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and this was his yearly allowance of clothes: A gowne, a cap, a hat, ii dubletes, ii payres of hose, iiii payres of netherstockes, vi payre of shoes, ii shirts, and two bandes. He was allowed also one quire of paper every quarter; and half a pound of candles every fortnight from Michaelmas to Lady Day. He studied law, may for a time have fought as a soldier in France, and became a physician. He died on March 1, 1620, and was buried on the same day at St. Dunstan's in the West, Fleet Street, the entry in the register under that date being: "Thomas Campion, doctor of Phisicke, was buried."

I have taken these particulars from Mr. S. P. Vivian's edition of his poems, because it is pleasant to share even this little of what is known of a man who is not only a rare and true poet—though for two centuries a forgotten one—but also because he was one of the chief song-writers in the great age of English Music. Like all good craftsmen, he did his work "well, surely, cleanly, workmanly, substantially, curiously, and sufficiently," as did the glaziers of King's College Chapel, which is distant but a kingfisher's flight over a strip of lovely water from his own serene Peterhouse. It seems a little curious that being himself a lover of music he should have at first disliked rhymes in verse, though he lived to write such delicate rhymed poems as this.

In the preface to his Book of Ayres, he tells the secret of his craft: "In these English Ayres," he says, "I have chiefely aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be much for him to doe that hath not power over both."

160. "What is there hid in the Heart of a Rose?"

There is a legend in Sir John Mandeville's Travels, which in our spelling runs thus: "Bethlehem is a little city, long and narrow and well walled, and on each side enclosed with good ditches. It was wont to be called Ephrata.... And toward the east end of the city is a full fair church and a gracious, and it hath many towers, pinnacles, and corners, full strong, and curiously made; and within that church be forty-four pillars of marble, massive and fair.

"And between the city and the church is the field Floridus, that is to say, the 'Field of Flowers'; it being so named for this reason: A fair maiden was blamed with wrong and slandered ... for which cause she was demned to death and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was led. And, as the fire began to crackle about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,—that, as assuredly as she was not guilty of that sin, He would help her and make it to be known to all men, of His merciful grace. And when she had thus said, she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire quenched and out; and the brands that were burning became red rose-trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white rose-trees, full of roses. And these were the first rose-trees and roses, both white and red, that ever any man saw; and thus was this maiden saved by the grace of God. And therefore is that field clept the field of God, Floridus, for it is full of roses."

163. "These Flowers, as in their causes, sleep." (line 4)

—while, also, flowers may themselves be the causes of poems, as, in a degree, a dewdrop in a buttercup is of the buttercup's causing. There the rhodora, or rhododendron:

And here anemone and cyclamen—in an enchanting little poem of but the day before yesterday:

"The Phoenix builds her Spicy Nest." (line 18)

The Phoenix, in faith rather than by sight, is thus described by Pliny: "She is as big as an eagle, in colour yellow, and bright as gold, namely all about the neck, the rest of the bodie a deepe red purple; the taile azure blue, intermingled with feathers among of rose carnation colour: and the head bravely adorned with a crest and pennache finely wrought, having a tuft and plume thereupon right faire and goodly to be seene."

Her life is but three hundred and nine years less in duration than that of the many-centuried patriarch Methuselah. When the lassitude of age begins to creep upon her, she wings across sea and land to the sole Arabian Tree. There she builds a nest of aromatic twigs, cassia and frankincense, and enkindling it with her own dying ardour she is consumed to ashes. And yet—while still they are of a heat beyond the tempering of the sun that shines down on them from the heavens, they magically stir, take body and awaken; and she rearises to life renewed, in her gold, her rose carnation, her purple and azure blue.

164. "The Bower of Bliss."

This and No. 348 are but the merest fragments of the Faerie Queene; but they show of what an echoing mutable music are its words. And were ever light and colour so living, natural and crystal clear? Reading this verse, hearing its sounds and seeing its sights in the imagination, you cannot think Thomas Nash was too fantastical when he wrote: "Poetry is the Honey of all Flowers, the Quintessence of all Sciences, the Marrow of Art and the very Phrase of Angels." Indeed, as Spenser's epitaph in Westminster Abbey says of him, he was the Prince of Poets of his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him. And poet of poets he has always remained. John Keats, when he was a boy, used to sit in a little summerhouse at Enfield with his schoolfellow Cowden Clarke, simply drinking in this verse, and laying up store of purest English for his own brief life's matchless work. So, too, Abraham Cowley:

"How this love (for poetry) came to be produced in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old...."

170.

The poems of Robert Herrick and of Thomas Campion though known well in their own day remained for many years practically unread and forgotten. Thomas Traherne's (who died in 1674) had an even more curious fate, for they were discovered in manuscript and by chance on a bookstall so lately as 1896, and were first taken to be the work of Henry Vaughan. Here is a passage in prose from Centuries of Meditation, by the same writer, repeating this reverie of his childhood in other words: "The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! oh, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels! and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels: I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire...."

172. "But silly we." (line 9)

This poem, I think carries with it the thought that in study of that great book, that fair volume, called the World, there is no full stop, no limit, pause, conclusion. Like bees, with their nectar and honeycomb, man stores up his knowledge and experience in books. These and his houses outlast him; the things he makes; and here and there a famous or happy or tragic name is for a while remembered. Else, we have our Spring and Summer—and dark cold skies enough, many of us—then vanish away, seeming but restless phantoms in Time's enormous dream. So far at least as this world is concerned. And generations of men—as of the grasses and flowers—follow one upon the other.

And yet, "But silly we" is true of most of us and of most of our time on earth. As Coventry Patmore says:

Or again, in the words of Sir John Davies—long since dead:

175. "For Soldiers"

from an old book entitled, "A Posie of Gilloflowers, eche differing from other in Colour and Odour, yet all sweete." There were pretty and sonorous names for collections of poems in the days of Humfrey Gifford (of whom nothing is known but that he made this Posie)—such as Wits Commonwealth; The Banket of Sapience; The Paradise of Dainty Devices; A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions; and A Handfull of Pleasant Delights.

"Ye Buds of Brutus Land"

sons of those, that is, who, according to the ancient myth were descended from Brut or Brute, the Trojan, the conqueror of Albion and its giants, the founder of London, after whom the land is named Britain.

"Soldiers are Prest" (stanza I)

that is, seized by the King's men, the press-gangs, and carried away by force to fight in the wars.

"Your Queen."

"To the Most High, Mightie and Magnificent Empresse Renowmed for Pietie, Vertue, and all Gratious Government Elizabeth by the Grace of God Queene of England Fraunce and Ireland and of Virginia." So runs Spenser's dedication of "The Faerie Queene," while in "The Shepheardes Calender" for April, are the lines:

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Oberon tells Puck how he saw that "Faire Vestall" in danger of Love's sharp arrows—and "The Imperiall Votresse passèd on In maiden meditation, fancy free." But Shakespeare, if actually invited to Court, it is said, "was in paine."

176. "The Battle-Hymn."

The writer of this magnificent Battle-Hymn died in 1910, at the age of ninety-one. If Henry Carey, who wrote our own "National Anthem," had realised how much and how often his fellow countrymen were to be fated to use his words, he would perhaps have taken a little more trouble with them (as much, at any rate, as Shelley and Flecker took in their versions of it), and would have found a pleasanter rhyme than "over us" for "glorious," and than "voice" for "cause." If, on the other hand, he had read the following Grace which Ben Jonson made at the moment's call before King James, he might perhaps have refrained from rhyming altogether, and so, by sheer modesty, would have missed being immortalized:

"The king," says John Aubrey, "was mighty enquisitive to know who this Raph was. Ben told him 'twas the drawer at the Swanne taverne, by Charing-crosse, who drew him good Canarie. For this drollery his majestie gave Ben an hundred poundes....

177.

"To those," it is said, "who have resided a long time by the falls of Niagara, the lowest whisper is distinctly audible." Their hearing accustoms itself to that unending and enormous roar, and becomes more exquisite. This is untrue of those whose finer sense is lulled by the roar of war: they become deafened, and cannot hear the voice of the one soldier—of which human "ones" every army is composed. And so war may poison even when its intention and its cause are honour and faith. In this particular poem (No. 177), the soldier is one of those who fought in the Transvaal in the years 1899-1901.

180.

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer—these are the names of but a few of the men, none of them old, many of them in the heyday of their gifts and genius, who besides proving themselves soldiers in the Great War had also proved themselves poets. Within his powers, every true poet lives in his country's service. These in that service died.

" ... Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of which are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. The place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. But something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, and hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon of outer night thudding on the earth—the incessant guns of the great war.

And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child, who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable, the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I used to know in the morning."

H. M. Tomlinson

184.

The reader may speculate how it is that while room has been found here for this entrancing rhyme, none has been made for Macaulay's longer Lays, Browning's Cavalier Songs, and a host of poems equally gallant and spirited. Perhaps he will forgive their absence if he will consider what is said on page xxxiii, and if he will also remember that every chooser must make his choice.

There is, too, the story of the Woodcutter's son. This fuzzheaded boy, called Dick or Dickon, while playing on his elder pipe the tune of "Over the Hills" one dappled sunshine morning in the woods, fortuning to squinny his eye sidelong over his pipe, perceived a crooked and dwarf old man to be standing beside him where before was only a solitary bearded thistle. This old man, the twist of whose countenance showed him to be one with an ear for woodland music, invited the Woodcutter's son to descend with him into the orchards of the Gnomes—and to help himself. This he did, and marvellously he fared. On turning out his pockets that night—the next day being a Sunday—his Mother found (apart from the wondrous smouldering heap of fruits, amethyst, emerald, rubies and the topaz, which he had given her) two or three strange unpolished stones, and these also from the Old Man's orchards. And she climbed up with her candle, he being abed, and asked him why he had burdened himself with such things of little seeming value, when he might have carried off their weight in diamonds big as dumplings. "Well, you see, mother dear," he drowsily replied, "I chose of the best and brightest till my eyes dazzled; and then there was a bird that called, Dick! Dick! Dick! Dick! and those magic pebbles were among her eggs."

185. "We be the King's Men."

The Song of Soldiers from Act I., Scene I., Part i. of that mighty play, The Dynasts. "The time is a fine day in March, 1805. A highway crosses the ridge, which is near the sea, and the south coast is seen bounding the landscape below, the open Channel extending beyond."

186. Budmouth Dears

—from The Dynasts, Act II., Scene I., Part iii.—the song sung in Camp on the Plain of Vittoria by Sergeant Young (of Sturminster Newton) of the Fifteenth (King's) Hussars on the eve of the longest day in the year 1813 and of Wellington's victory.

187. "Trafalgar"

—from The Dynasts, Act V., Scene VII., Part i. Boatmen and burghers with their pipes and mugs are sitting on settles round the fire in the taproom of the Old Rooms Inn at Weymouth. The body of Nelson on board his battered Victory has lately been brought to England to be sepulchred in St. Paul's. And this is the Song the Second Boatman sings.

The "Nothe," line 8, is the promontory that divides for Weymouth, where lived Nelson's Captain Hardy, its harbour or back-sea on the north, and the Portland Roads, its front-sea on the south "Roads," meaning protected seas where ships may ride at anchor. On this tempestuous and fateful night, October 21, 1805, the breakers were sweeping clean across the spit of land called the Narrows. On the further side runs for a round ten miles that enormous wall of pebbles—Chesil Beach, whose stones the tides sort out so precisely—the least in size towards Lyme Regis—that a coast-man can tell even in a thick mist where he has landed on the beach, merely by measuring them with his eye. About ten miles up this water swim in Spring the swans of the Swannery of Abbotsbury with their cygnets, each mother-bird striving to decoy as many strange young ones into her train as she can. So deals a proud and powerful nation with the lesser kingdoms of the earth.

About four years and a half before Trafalgar, on April 2nd, 1801, Nelson and Parker had won the Battle of the Baltic—as Thomas Campbell (who was then twenty-four), in his well-known poem tells:

So accustomed, indeed, are we mere landsmen to the exploits of the Navy on the High Seas that we easily forget it was once to our forefathers a novelty and a wonder—such a wonder as might be compared with the fabulous Castles in Spain or the Gardens of Babylon, as the old nameless poet of the following lines recounts:

189. "Brave Sailors."

And here is one of them—come home to his sweetheart, and she (until stanza 6) not recognizing him:

To get any rhythm into this doggerel is like persuading a donkey to gallop. And yet how clearly one sees the dark night, the disguised sailor and his sweetheart talking together on the river strand, and the ships on its bosom in the gloom; while the wistful, deceitful tale he tells her is as old as Romance. Once get cantering, too; how pleasing is the motion!

192. "Dark Rosaleen."

From his childhood, which was spent in a little shop in Dublin, Mangan had a dark and troubled life. But always a passionate love for his country, Ireland—his Dark Rosaleen—burned on in his imagination as it is revealed in the wild and haunting music of this poem.

197.

There are so many words in this poem strange to an English ear that it seems better to explain them here so as not to interrupt the actual reading of it too much. After all, the little that is not plain speaks in its music, and that is a very large part of what we call its "meaning." For the meaning of a poem is all the interest, thought, pictures, music, and happiness that we can get out of it—it is all that it does to us.

Stanza (1) "loaning" is a green path in the fields, and "ilka" means every; "wede" means faded or vanished. (2) "bught" is a sheepfold; "scorning" I suppose means cracking jokes at one another; "dowie" means sad and drooping; "daffing" and "gabbing" is larking and gossiping; a "leglin" is a milkpail. (3) "hairst" means harvest; "bandsters, "sheaf-binders"; "lyart" is faded with age; "runkled" wrinkled; "fleeching" is wheedling or coaxing or flirting. (4) "swankies" means the blithe lads of stanza 2; "bogle" means goblin or bogey—an evening game like "I spy," I should think. (5) "Dool and wae" means sorrow or grief and woe.

199.

Robert Hayman, a Merchant of Bristol at the age of twenty-five, was a nephew of Sir Walter Raleigh's. He became Governor of a Plantation called The British Hope in Newfoundland. In 1628 he settled in Guiana (of whose gilded and barbaric Amazonian princesses his uncle tells in Hakluyt's Voyages). He made his will in 1633, and nothing more was afterwards heard of him—at least by the people of Bristol.

Poetry shines out of his stumbling verses like the setting sun through a thicket of thorns. Their "Totnes" is an uncommonly old town, mainly consisting of that "long street" where, when a boy, he met "godly Drake." At its East-Gate is the Brutus-stone—for here Brut of Troy is said first to have trodden English soil, having landed from the Dart. Twenty miles distant to westward of the town lies on its rivers Plymouth—the Spaniards' wasps' nest—its Drake in stone now gazing out to sea from its Hoe. Twenty miles to the east on the coast is Hayes Barton, where Raleigh was born about 1552. And seven miles down the Dart is the village of Greenway, the home of his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the discoverer of Newfoundland, who was in that year a boy of about sixteen. Here amid-stream juts up the Anchor Rock upon which, runs the story, the discoverer of tobacco and of the potato used to sit and smoke his pipe. In 1587 Gilbert and Raleigh sailed together in search of the as yet Unfoundland, but on that voyage in vain.

200. "For Hally Now is Dead."

Hally was Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of James I., Queen Elizabeth's godson, and a beloved patron of the arts and poetry to whom Sir Walter Raleigh looked for happy favours. He was little of body and quick of spirit, and, like Alexander, delighted "to witch the World with noble horsemanship." He died when he was nineteen. In Windsor Castle may be seen a suit of armour made for this young prince when he was a boy—a suit which for grace and craftsmanship is said to be one of the most beautiful things of its kind in the world.

202. "Henry Before Agincourt."

Here, again, the verse of this ancient fragment jolts, jars, and moves cumbrously as a cannon over rocky ground. But how wide and moving a picture it presents, and how noble is its utterance.

203. "Alexander the Great."

This is the translation of another ancient Irish poem made by Kuno Meyer. Plutarch wrote Alexander's Life (comparing him with Julius Caesar), in which the young prince is pictured as if by Velasquez. Here are a few words from the translation of this life which Sir Thomas North made from the French of Amiot:

"The ambition and desire he (Alexander) had of honour showed a certain greatness of mind and noble courage, passing his years.... For when he was asked one day (because he was swift of foot) whether he would assay to run for victory at the Olympian Games, 'I could be content' (said he), 'so I might run with Kings'." When, too, "they brought him news that his Father had taken some famous city, or had won some great battle, he was nothing glad to hear it, but would say to his playfellows: 'Sirs, my Father will have all: I shall have nothing left me to conquer with you that shall be ought worth' ..."

205. "And the Kings Asleep."

... Not a stone-cast from the summit of the hill where all snow was now parched and evaporated away, stood a cairn of boulders and thereon sate three Eagles whose eyes surveyed the kingdoms of the world, its seas and Man's lost possessions. And the Eagle that was eastwards of the three, a little rimpled her wings and cried: "Where now? where now?" And the Eagle that shook upon her plumes the dazzle of the dying sun stretched out her corded neck and yelped: "Man! Man!" And the midmost Eagle stooped low its golden head and champed between its talons with its beak upon the boulder: "The Earth founders," she mewed. And a stillness was upon the hill as though of a myriad watching eyes.

207. "Dance Sedately"

—and here are two old rhymes for the dancing to. One for a Morris Dance:

And this for a Flower Dance:

And yet another for one's Lonesome Low:

The "dochter" is of course daughter, "nit" is nut, and "slae" sloe.

209.

Pause an instant on the fifth word in the third stanza and you can actually hear the birds laughing—yaffle, blackcap, bullfinch and jay, and the droning and the whistling and the whir-r-r.

210. Fa la La.

Scattered through this volume are many songs, a few of them—both words and music—exceedingly ancient. Mr. Nahum had a cofferful of old hand-written music (square crotchets and quavers and handsome clefs); and many outlandish instruments were hung up in the dust and silence in one of his cupboards. I remember some small living thing set a string jangling when for the first time the door admitted me to a sight of their queer shapes and appearances. In an old book of 1548, The Complaynt of Scotland, there is a list of names, not only of old folk-tales such as "The tayl of the wolfe of the varldes end"; and "The tayl of the giantes that eit quyk men," but of songs and dances for long in common love and knowledge even in those old times. Here are a few of the songs:

And here some Dances:

All Christian Men's Dance.

Long Flat Foot of Garioch.

The Lamb's Wind.

Leaves Green.

The Bace of Voragon.

The Loch of Slene.

The Bee.

Shake a Trot, and

The Vod and the Val.

The tunes to these were played at that day on four kinds of bagpipe (including a drone bagpipe), a trump, a recorder, a "fiddell," and a "quhissil"—which is the pleasantest way of spelling whistle I have yet seen. The melodies and words of most of them are, apparently, all now clean forgotten.

"Fa la la" (No. 210) is of a different kind, being one of hundreds of madrigals, "ayres" and ballets of which both the words and the music were written in England in the first twenty years or so of the seventeenth century. There is, of course, a hoard of learning that one may study on this English music—William Byrd's, John Dowland's, Thomas Ford's, Thomas Campion's, John Bartlet's, Philip Rosseter's, Robert Ayres' and others—which in its own day was as famous in the countries of Europe as English poetry is now. It was the coming of foreign music and musicians to England—the Italians and Handel and Mendelssohn—that put it ungratefully out of mind. To-day its dust has at last been brushed away. The Madrigals are being printed and sung again, and Dr. Fellowes has lately published a volume containing the words of hundreds of such lively, nimble and heart-entrancing rhymes—intended by their writers to carry with them a double charm—not only their own verbal melody, grace and beauty, but also their music's.

My own knowledge is scanty indeed, but I gather that a madrigal is intended to be sung, unaccompanied with instruments, by voices only—three to five, six, or seven, it may be, and men's and women's or boys', coursing, echoing, interweaving, responding and rilling together like the countless runnels and wavelets of a brook over its stones, or a wood full of singing birds at evening. An Ayre is different. It is for the voice—singing its melody to the accompaniment of lute, viol or virginal, as a nightingale may sing at dusk above the murmur of a softly-brawling brook. A Ballet, the most ancient of all three, went hand in hand and foot to foot with a dance.

All I wish to make clear is that the printed words of Nos. 210 and 212, for instance, can give only a fraction of the pleasure their poets intended, who in writing had always the singing voice and often the twangling string in mind. Their very age to my fancy gives them an enticing strangeness, grace, and freshness. For in their company the imagination returns to the days when first they rang out in the taverns and parlours and palaces and streets of a London that from every steeple and tower was within sight of green fields; a noble city of but about three hundred thousand people (including children) wherein you might any day find William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Chapman and the rest talking together in its taverns, the Mermaid or the Triple Tun, while that ill-fortuned traveller and statesman, Sir Walter Raleigh, fallen upon evil days, sat mewed up in the Tower of London, engrossed in his History of the World.

None the less there are human beings who remain deaf to the magic both of words and music—that, like the deaf adder, stop their ears: "I know very well," wrote Sir William Temple, "that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music as toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to these charms, would I think do well to keep their own counsel, for ... while this world lasts, I doubt most but the pleasure and requests of these two entertainments will do so too; and happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent; and do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them!

"When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

211. "The Onely Pretty Ring Time."

212.

There might be an instant's check or faltering at the eighth line, but make it "when the Winds Blow and the Seas Flow"—the great flood of air and water banking up as it were into the words as does the Atlantic in a gale at the Spring Equinox—and all's well.

213. "And the Fleas That Tease in the High Pyrenees."

"The flee is a lyttell worme, and greveth men mooste; and scapeth and voideth peril with lepynge and not with runnynge, and wexeth slowe and fayleth in colde tyme, and in somer tyme it wexeth quiver and swyft; and spareth not kynges."

214. "I Loved a Lass."

George Wither, says Aubrey, could make verses as fast as he could write them. So, too, could Shakespeare. "What he thought," said his editors, "he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers."

Still:—"So, So-a! fair and softly!" said the old Shropshire farmer to Job his plough-horse when he kicked up his heels as if to break into a gallop; "So, So-a! When thou'rt a racer, my dear, or born a high-blood Arab, there'll be time enough for that. Some goes their best slow."

If the lass's "fives" in the fourth stanza (of 214) were the fives of to-day she must have had a quite comfortable foot, a size or two larger, at any rate, than the bride's in Sir John Suckling's Ballad upon a Wedding:

218. "And St. John's Bell Rings for Matins."

June 24 is not only the birthday of St. John the Baptist, but also the year's Sun Day, for about this day, following through the night but a little way beneath the horizon, he rises at dawn furthest North of East in his annual journey (see p. xiv). As once on May-day so it was then formerly the custom, all England over, to set bonfires blazing on the hilltops, around which the country people danced and sang. The dairy-maid who had the breath, and was fleet enough of foot to ring around, between dusk and daybreak, nine such merry bonfires before they were burnt out, assured her heart of a happy marriage within the year.

219. "O It's Dabbling in the Dew Makes the Milkmaids Fair!"

The words in this poem are spelt as they are spoken in the County of Dorset. "Rathe" means early; and "below" beneath. There is a half-secret rhyme in each fourth line.

223. "Music, When Soft Voices Die, Vibrates in The Memory."

224. "A Bell in Moscow." (stanza 4)

Of this I saw the picture in Thrae. It was named Czar Kolokol, and, when cast, was of the weight of about twenty-six hundred heavy men. It now stands clapperless on the ground with a breach in its metal side. Through this breach the people go into its silence to pray.

225.

This "Country Rhime," with Nos. 121 and 434, is taken from A Book for Boys and Girls, written by John Bunyan. It came out into the world on May 12th, 1686, two years before Bunyan died on Snow Hill in London; and two years after the publication of the Second Part of The Pilgrim's Progress, "wherein is set forth the manner of the setting out of Christian's Wife and Children, their dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the Desired Country."

When Bunyan was young he loved ringing the bells with the ringers in the steeple of the village church of Elstow, where he was born, and where his grandfather, Thomas Bonyon, was "a common baker of human bread."

All these "Homely rhimes" are followed in this particular Book for Boys and Girls by comparisons", as here: first the bells; then a lesson about them. They are parables. But in Mr. Nahum's copying, many of the lessons were omitted; perhaps because he preferred to think out his own. Not that the poetry that is intended to teach, to praise virtue, and to instil wisdom in the heart and mind of its readers is any the less poetry for this reason. Nevertheless, every beautiful thing in this world—the hyssop in the wall and the cedar of Lebanon, Solomon in all his glory and the ring on his finger, carries with it joy and wonder of the life that is ours, and gratitude to the Maker of all. And poets who, when writing, are too intent upon teaching, are apt to forfeit their rarest poetry.

232.

Dorothy was William Wordsworth's only sister and his friend Coleridge's close friend. What she squandered on these two poets—her self, her talk, her imagination, her love—only they could tell. "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears," once wrote her brother; she shared his visionary happiness. With Coleridge she used to walk and talk so nearly and dearly that again and again in her Journal she uses all but the very words—that "thin gray cloud," the line on Spring, or on the one red leaf, for instance—which are so magically his own in Christabel (No. 345).

233. "To Autumn."

I read this—perhaps the loveliest of John Keats's odes, many times before I realised that the whole of it is addressed to the musing apparition or phantasm of Autumn whom in its second stanza he describes as if she were in image there before him. This, perhaps, was partly because the poem is usually printed with a full stop after "clammy cells," and partly because of my own stupidity.

Thomas Hood, in his scarcely less beautiful Ode, sees Autumn first as an old man:

And later, in his fourth stanza:

237. "A Foolish Thing."

"Far to fetch" it certainly is; but here is a little counsel to this end from the old Irish Instructions of King Cormac (of the ninth century). Of Carbery I know no more, but doubtless there is much to hear:

"O Cormac, grandson of Conn," said Carbery, "what is the worst for the body of man?"

"Not hard to tell," said Cormac. "Sitting too long, lying too long, long standing, lifting heavy things, exerting oneself beyond one's strength, running too much, leaping too much, frequent falls, sleeping with one's leg over the bed-rail, gazing at glowing embers, wax, biestings [very new milk], new ale, bull-flesh, curdles, dry food, bog-water, rising too early, cold, sun, hunger, drinking too much, eating too much, sleeping too much, sinning too much, grief, running up a height, shouting against the wind, drying oneself by a fire, summer-dew, winter-dew, beating ashes, swimming on a full stomach, sleeping on one's back, foolish romping." ...

"O Cormac, grandson of Conn," said Carbery, "I desire to know how I shall behave among the wise and the foolish, among friends and strangers, among the old and the young, among the innocent and the wicked."

"Not hard to tell," said Cormac.

But what the exact total of all these "too's" may be is a riddle only the Higher Mathematics can solve.

"Our Play is done"

—after which, in Elizabeth's day, "the characters (one or more) were wont to kneel down upon the stage and to offer a solemn prayer for the sovereign, or other patron":

"My tongue is wearie; when my Legs are too, I will bid you good night; and so kneele down before you: But (indeed) to pray for the Queene."

Henry IV.

245. "Ah! would 'twere so."

246. "No Crane talks." (line 16)

So also, according to travellers, talk, argue in parliament, camp, and keep watch the wandering tribes of the gaudy-dyed Baboons.

249.

If this poem is read softly, pausingly, without haste, the very words will seem like snowflakes themselves, floating into the mind; and then, the beauty and the wonder.

251

Here again, as in music, there are rests in the second, fourth and fifth lines of each stanza. Is there any magic to compare with that still solemn unearthly radiance when the world is masked with snow; and the very sparkling of the mind is like hoar-frost on the bark of a tree.

253. "The Wild Woods."

Allan Cunningham's in Scotland, and these—Mr. Robert Frost's—in Vermont U.S.A.:

255.

There may be a few small verbal puzzles in this fifteenth-century carol—otherwise as clear, sharp and shining as a winter moon.

Kechoun is kitchen, and Stephen (who waited on the King at bed and board) stepped out of it into the hall, "boar's head on hand." Kyst, means cast; eylet, aileth; wod is mad. So too brede, I fancy. When the roasted capon or cock crowed in its dish, Herod, in wrath and fear cried on his torturers, "by two and all by one" to rise up and kill.

In later times a clay or earthenware box made all of a piece, with a slit in it, was carried by apprentices through the streets on St. Stephen's day, for money. And never a Catholic missionary once sailed for the Indies, Barbary, or the Islands of the Anthropophagites, but a box was hung by the priests in the church for alms against his return. From the former old custom comes our "Boxing Day."

In the Isle of Man, however, the Christmas Box was called the Wren Box, and for this reason: There dwelt of old a Lorelei, siren or sea-elf, in the emerald green creeks and caves of a solitary precipitous island. She was as lovely as she was cruel, and her shrill sweet voice rose amid the roaring and soughing of the waves in her steep rocky habitation as shines a poisonous flower in the dark of a forest. Thus she would at daybreak enchant to their doom sailors following their craft on the sea. Leaning to listen to this music creeping by them on the waters, they drew in to her haunts. Of their bones were coral made; while she lived on; sang on. She was hunted down at last in her sea-grottoes by those who, like Ulysses, had stopped their ears against her incantations. Brought finally to bay, her beauty and bright hair suddenly dwindled and dimmed, and she escaped in the shape of—Jenny Wren. Alas, for Jenny Wren! condemned ever after for the woes of this siren to be pursued with sticks and stones by young loons, cullions and Jerry Sneaks, on every St. Stephen's Day. As goes the rhyme:

and a sinister company they look, especially "milder"!

257.

258. "Welcome Twelfth Day"

and here is a rhyme (entitled Jolagiafir) for a memory-game they used to play in old times on Twelfth Night after the bean or silver-penny had been discovered in the Twelfth Cake, and the Wassail Bowl has gone round with the Mince Pies.

And so on to—

And here is a recipe for Lamb's Wool, with which to fill "the Bowl": Take "the pulpe of rosted apples, in number four or five according to the greatnesse of the apples (especially the pome water), and mix it heartily in a wine quart of faire water"—or old ale—"with a due and fair lacing of nutmegs, sugar and ginger"—until the company can wait no longer.

And here's another "Twelve"; from Scotland:

259.

It looks as if this carol—of Henry VI.'s reign—was once a singing game: On the one side in the blaze of the Yule Log the Holly men with gilded and garlanded pole; and on the other Ivy with her maidens; each side taunting the other, and maybe tugging for prisoners. "Ivy-girls," too, used to be burned by companies of boys, and Holly-boys by girls—all yawping and jodelling at the sport.

"Poppynguy" may perhaps be the jay, but it would be pleasanter company for the lark, if here it means the green woodpecker. His other names are rain-bird, hew-hole, wood-sprite, woodweele, woodspeek and yaffle, the very sound of which is like the echo of his own laughter in the sunny green tops of the wood.

260. "When Isicles hang by the Wall."

There is a peculiar magic (which may perhaps be less apparent to the Greenlanders) in icicles. Nor are its effects unknown to the four-footed. In certain remote regions of Siberia there is said to be a little animal called the Iccė-vulff (or Ice-wolf). He has prick-ears, is a fierce feeder, and wears a coat so wondrous close and dense that three or four of our English moles' skins laid one atop the other would yet fall short of its match. But he seldom attains to a ripe age, and for this reason. As soon as he is freed from his dam's snow-burrow, he hastes off to the dwellings of the men of those parts, snuffing their dried seal-steaks and blubber, being a most incorrigible thief and a very wary. And such is his craft that he mocks at gins, traps and pitfalls. But he has a habit which is often to his undoing. It is in this wise: The heat of these hovels is apt to melt a little the snow upon them, its water trickling and coursing softly down till long, keen icicles are formed, upon which, whether hungry or fed, taking up his station in a plumb line beneath them, he will squat and gloat for an hour together, having a marvellous greedy pleasure in clear glasslike colours. Hearing his breathing or faint snuffing, any human who wakes within will of a sudden violently shake the wall between. This dislodges the pendent icicles, and the squatting Iccė-vulff is pierced to his death as with a sword.

Winter indeed makes crystal even of ink. It has the power of enchanting every imagination; and particularly Coleridge's:

264. "Woe weeps out Her Division when She sings."

This means, I think, that she adds her own grieved cadences to the melody, as may one, among many voices, singing in harmony.

265. "Is like a Bubble."

This rainbow "bubble"—like Shelley's "many-coloured dome of glass" in his Adonais—seems, before our very eyes, to be floating up into the empty blue heavens, until it smalls into a bead of gold, and vanishes. It brings to memory—though I am uncertain of the first line—an epitaph in the church at Zennor, a village clustered above the Atlantic on the dreamlike coast of Cornwall—an epitaph cut in fine lettering into its slate slab, while at each corner of the slab Cherubs' heads puff out their round cheeks, representing the winds of the world:

266. "O, Sweet Content."

"Art Thou poor ... Art Thou rich."

The subject being riches, here from Hugh Rhodes, is a nourishing crumb or two of advice. Cautions the poem is called, and it may be found in the Book of Nurture:

And, to make trebly sure:

Three false sisters: "Perhaps," "May be," "I dare say."

Three timid brothers: "Hush!" "Stop!" "Listen!"

269. "Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed."

The most ancient poem I know of consists of such a sigh. It comes from an Egyptian tomb, was composed about 5000 years ago, and might have been written by some melancholy soul at his sick-room window yesterday afternoon. For, after all, these ancients whose mummies are now a mere wonder for the curious, all lived, as Raleigh says, "in the same newness of time which we call 'old time.'"