or key, perchance but a single note or chord. But
that suffices, and it is as a sudden vision of our home, far off among
the mountains, or in the "happy valley" of our fathers, passing before
us in the gay crowded city, bringing plaintive thoughts of remembered
joys, and quietude, and childish innocence. Old ballads are like April
skies, all smiles and tears, sunshine and swift-flitting clouds, that
serve but to heighten the loveliness they concealed for a while. They
are like,--nay, we despair; none but our own Shakspeare can express what
we should vainly puzzle ourselves to describe, the essence of the "old
and antique song."

"Mark it, Cesario; it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chaunt it; it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age."

Ay! like gray eld fondling sunny childhood, gazing on the wavy hair, and
pure brow, and calm yet kindling eye, with a fond sad pleasure; for in
that young exulting spirit he sees the sure inheritor of his own fading
honours, the usurper of his strength, and influence, and worship,
rapidly passing away from his feeble grasp; and as he gazes, though his
lips pour willing benedictions on the unconscious supplanter, there
lingers in his heart the sorrowful, "He shall increase, but I shall
decrease."

Something akin in their sad soothing effect, are the _waits_, (dear
reader, you do not need to be told what these are? Wordsworth has
immortalized them;) simple, rude, and inharmonious as they would be in
the clear, truth-telling daylight, but strange, witching, and half
unearthly, when heard between the pauses of some fantastic dream in the
deep midnight; when,

"All around,
The stars are watching with their thousand eyes;"

those same stars that peered down on this earth, in "earnest gaze," on
the first act of that most awful drama, when, in "the winter wild, the
heaven-born child"--Him in whom all nations of the world were
blessed--was placed in his rude cradle at Bethlehem: in commemoration of
whose advent--and _this_ is one secret of their pathos, waking high
thoughts in the soul, too long brooding over and degrading itself with
the mean cares and hopes of this life--the humble musicians make night
tuneful, "scraping the chords with strenuous hand."

A blessing on them as they go, softening our hard, unloving hearts! In
our childh