T CHRISTMAS_

What is the meaning of our English Christmas? What makes it seem so
truly Northern, national, and homely, that we do not like to keep
the feast upon a foreign shore? These questions grew upon me as I
stood one Advent afternoon beneath the Dome of Florence. A priest
was thundering from the pulpit against French scepticism, and
exalting the miracle of the Incarnation. Through the whole dim
church blazed altar candles. Crowds of men and women knelt or sat
about the transepts, murmuring their prayers of preparation for the
festival. At the door were pedlars selling little books, in which
were printed the offices for Christmas-tide, with stories of S.
Felix and S. Catherine, whose devotion to the infant Christ had
wrought them weal, and promises of the remission of four purgatorial
centuries to those who zealously observed the service of the Church
at this most holy time. I knew that the people of Florence were
preparing for Christmas in their own way. But it was not our way. It
happened that outside the church the climate seemed as wintry as our
own--snowstorms and ice, and wind and chilling fog, suggesting
Northern cold. But as the palaces of Florence lacked our comfortable
firesides, and the greetings of friends lacked our hearty handshakes
and loud good wishes, so there seemed to be a want of the home
feeling in those Christmas services and customs. Again I asked
myself, 'What do we mean by Christmas?'

The same thought pursued me as I drove to Rome: by Siena, still and
brown, uplifted, mid her russet hills and wilderness of rolling
plain; by Chiusi, with its sepulchral city of a dead and unknown
people; through the chestnut forests of the Apennines; by Orvieto's
rock, Viterbo's fountains, and the oak-grown solitudes of the
Ciminian heights, from which one looks across the broad lake of
Bolsena and the Roman plain. Brilliant sunlight, like that of a day
in late September, shone upon the landscape, and I thought--Can this
be Christmas? Are they bringing mistletoe and holly on the country
carts into the towns in far-off England? Is it clear and frosty
there, with the tramp of heels upon the flag, or snowing silently,
or foggy with a round red sun and cries of warning at the corners of
the streets?

I reached Rome on Christmas Eve, in time to hear midnight services
in the Sistine Chapel and S. John Lateran, to breathe the dust of
decayed shrines, to wonder at doting cardinals begrimed with snuff,
and to