To few assemblages of men is it given to come together, in the scene of ancient memories, without having to "remember such things were, that were most precious."-But, excepting in those cases in which the suffering is extreme, or the sorrow immediate, —after a few hours given to a wholesome, and perhaps mournful, retrospect, the mind reädjusts itself to the tone of the time; and men, for the most part, seem to understand that they are met for the purpose of being as merry as it is in their natures to be. And to the attainment of this right joyous frame of mind, we have already said that a sense of the duration of the festival period greatly contributes. In the case of a single holiday, the mind had scarcely time to take the appropriate tone, before the period of celebration has passed away; and a sense of its transitoriness tends often to prevent the effort being made with that heartiness which helps to insure success.

But when the holiday of to-day terminates only that it may make way for the holiday of to-morrow, and gladness has an ancient charter, in virtue of which it claims dominion over a series of days so extended, that the happy school-boy-and some who are quite as happy as school-boys, and as merry too, cannot see the end of them, for the blaze of joyous things that lies between,then does the heart surrender itself confidently to the genius of the time, and lets loose a host of cheerful and kindly feelings which it knows will not be suddenly thrown back upon it, and heaps up pleasant devices upon the glowing flame of mirth,-as we heap up logs on the roaring fire,-laying them decently aside, at the end of the season,-as we lay aside the burnt-out brand of the Yule log,-to rekindle the Christmas fire and the Christmas feeling of another year.

But there is yet another reason, in aid of those which we have enumerated, accounting for an observance of the Christmas festivities more universal-and a preservation of its traditions more accurate and entire than are bestowed, in England, upon the festival customs of any other period of the year. This reason, which might not, at first view, seem so favorable to that end as in truth it is—is to be found in the outward and natural aspects of the season. We have been watching the year through the period of its decline,—are arrived at the dreary season of its old age,—

and stand near the edge of its grave. We have seen the rich sunshines, and sweet, but mournful twilights of the autumn, with their solemn inspirations, give place to the short days and gloomy evenings which usher in the coming Solstice. One by one, the fair faces of the flowers have departed from us; and the sweet murmuring of “shallow rivers, to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals;" has been exchanged for the harsh voice of the swollen torrent, and the dreary music of winds that " rave through the naked tree." Through many a chilling sign of " weary winter comin' fast," we have reached the—

For lo! the fiery horses of the sun,

Thro' the twelve signs their rapid course have run;

Time, like a serpent, bites his forked tail,

And winter, on a goat, bestrides the gale;

Rough blows the North-wind near Arcturus' star,
And sweeps, unreined, across the polar bar."

The halcyon days, which sometimes extend their southern influence even to our stern climate, and carry an interval of gloomy calm into the heart of this dreary month, have generally, ere its close, given place to the nipping frosts and chilling blasts of midwinter. "Out of the south" hath come "the whirlwind; and cold out of the north." The days have dwindled to their smallest stature; and the long nights, with their atmosphere of mist, shut in and circumscribe the wanderings of man. Clouds and shadows surround us. The air has lost its rich echoes, and the earth its diversified aspects; and to the immediate threshold of the house of feasting and merriment, we have travelled through those dreary days which are emphatically called "the dark days before Christmas." Of one of the gloomy mornings that usher in these melancholy days, Ben Jonson gives the following dismal description:

"It is, methinks, a morning full of fate!

It riseth slowly, as her sullen car

Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it!

She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black!

Her face is like a water turned to blood,

And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night, ere noon of day!
It does not look as it would have a hail

Or health wished in it-as of other morns!"

And the general discomforts of the season are bemoaned by old Sackville, with words that have a wintry sound, in the following passage which we extract from "England's Parnassus.”

"The wrathfull winter, proching on a pace

With blustring blast had all ybard the treene,
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene;
The mantle rent wherein inwrapped beene
The gladsome groves that now lay over-throwne,
The tapers torne, and every tree downe blowne;
The soyle, that erst so seemely was to seeme,
Was all dispoiled of her beauties hewe,
And stole fresh flowers (wherewith the Somer's queene
Had clad the earth), now Boreas blast downe blew ;
And small fowles flocking, in their songs did rew
The Winter's wrath, where with each thing defast,
In wofull wise bewayl'd the Sommer past:
Hawthorne had lost his motley liverie,

The naked twigs were shivering all for cold

And, dropping down the teares aboundantlie,

Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told
The cruel! season, bidding me with-hold
Myselfe within ;"

The feelings excited by this dreary period of transition,--and by the desolate aspect of external things to which it has at length brought us, would seem, at first view, to be little in harmony with a season of festival, and peculiarly unpropitious to the claims of merriment. And yet it is precisely this joyless condition of the natural world, which drives us to take refuge in our moral resources, at the same time that it furnishes us with the leisure necessary for their successful development. The spirit of cheerfulness which, for the blessing of man, is implanted in his nature -deprived of the many issues by which, at other seasons, it walks abroad, and breathes amid the sights and sounds of nature -is driven to its own devices for modes of manifestation, and takes up its station by the blazing hearth. In rural districts, the

varied occupations which call the sons of labor abroad into the fields are suspended by the austerities of the time; and to the cottage of the poor man has come a season of temporal repose, concurrently with the falling of that period which seals anew for him, as it were, the promises of an eternal rest. At no other portion of the year could a feast of equal duration find so many classes of men at leisure for its reception.

"With his ice, and snow, and rime,

Let bleak winter sternly come !

There is not a sunnier clime,

Than the love-lit winter home."

Amid the comforts of the fireside, and all its sweet companionships and cheerful inspirations, there is something like the sense of a triumph obtained over the hostilities of the season. Nature, which at other times promotes the expansion of the feelings, and contributes to the enjoyments of man, seems here to have promulgated her fiat against their indulgence ;-and there is a kind of inner world created, in evasion of her law-a tract won by the genius of the affections from the domain of desolation-spots of sunshine planted, by the heart, in the very bosom of shadow-a pillar of fire lit up in the darkness! And thus the sensation of a respite from toil-the charms of renewed companionship—the consciousness of a general sympathy of enjoyment running along all the links of the social chain-and the contrasts established within to the discomforts without-are all components of that propitious feeling to which the religious spirit of the season, and all its quaint and characteristic observances, make their appeal.

There is, too (connected with these latter feelings, and almost unacknowledged by the heart of man), another moral element of that cheerful sentiment which has sprung up within it. It consists in the prospect, even at this distant and gloomy period, of a coming spring. This is peculiarly the season of looking for. ward. Already, as it were, the infant face of the new year is perceived, beneath the folds of the old one's garment. The business of the present year has terminated; and, along the night which has succeeded to its season of labor, have been set up a

will be extinguished, only that the business of another seedtime may begin.

Neither, amid all its dreary features, is the natural season without its own picturesque beauty ;-nor even entirely divested of all its summer indications of a living loveliness, or all suggestions of an eternal hope. Not only hath it the peculiar beauties of old age; but it hath besides lingering traces of that beauty which old age hath not been able wholly to extinguish,—and which come finely in aid of the moral hints and religious hopes of the season.

The former-the graces which are peculiar to the season itself -exist in many a natural aspect and grotesque effect, which is striking, both for the variety it offers, and for its own intrinsic loveliness.

"We may find it in the wintry boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky, While soft on icy pool and stream the pencilled shadows lie,—

When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frostwork bound,

Whence the flitting red-breast shakes a shower of blossoms to the ground."

The white mantle which the earth occasionally puts on, with the rapidity of a spell, covering, in the course of a night, and while we have slept, the familiar forms with a sort of strangeness, that makes us feel as if we had awakened in some new and enchanted land—the fantastic forms assumed by the drifting snow—the wild and fanciful sketching of old winter upon the "frosty pane"the icicles that depend, like stalactites, from every projection, and sparkle in the sun like jewels of the most brilliant water—and, above all, the feathery investiture of the trees above alluded to, by which their minute tracery is brought out with a richness, shaming the carving of the finest chisel-are amongst the features which exhibit the inexhaustible fertility of nature, in the production of striking and beautiful effects. Hear how one of our best poetesses, Mary Howitt, sings of these graces.—

"One silent night hath passed,—and lo!

How beautiful the earth is now!

All aspect of decay is gone,

The hills have put their vesture on,

And clothed is the forest bough.