ooking on while he sleeps, with folded hands and overshadowing wings.
Sometimes Marry hangs over his pillow; "pondering in her heart"
the wondrous destinies of her Child. A poetess of our own time has
given us an interpretation worthy of the most beautiful of these
representations, in the address of the Virgin Mary to the Child
Jesus,--"Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One!"

"And are thou come for saving, baby-browed
And speechless Being? art thou come for saving?
The palm that grows beside our door is bowed
By treadings of the low wind from the south,
A restless shadow through the chamber waving,
Upon its bough a bird sings in the sun.
But thou, with that close slumber on thy mouth,
Dost seem of wind and sun already weary,
Art come for saving, O my weary One?

"Perchance this sleep that shutteth out the dreary
Earth-sounds and motions, opens on thy soul
High dreams on fire with God;
High songs that make the pathways where they roll
More bright than stars do theirs; and visions new
Of thine eternal nature's old abode.
Suffer this mother's kiss,
Best thing that earthly is,
To glide the music and the glory through,
Nor narrow in thy dream the broad upliftings
Of any seraph wing.
Thus, noiseless, thus!--Sleep, sleep, my dreaming One."[1]

[Footnote 1: Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. ii. p. 174.]

Such high imaginings might be suggested by the group of Michael
Angelo,--his famous "Silenzio:" but very different certainly are the
thoughts and associations conveyed by some of the very lovely, but at
the same time familiar and commonplace, groups of peasant-mothers and
sleeping babies--the countless productions of the later schools--even
while the simplicity and truth of the natural sentiment go straight to
the heart.

I remember reading a little Italian hymn composed for a choir of nuns,
and addressed to the sleeping Christ, in which he is prayed to awake
or if he will not, they threaten to pull him by his golden curls until
they rouse him to listen!

* * * * *

I have seen a graceful print which represents Jesus as a child
standing at his mother's knee, while she feeds him from a plate or cap
held by an angel; underneath is the text, "_Butter and honey shall he
eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good_" And
in a print of the same period, the mother suspends her needlework
to contemplate the Child, who, standin