ssing minutes. At last it gives a click; and now they
throw off coat and waistcoat, strap their girdles tighter round the
waist, and each holds his rope in readiness. Twelve o'clock strikes,
and forth across the silent city go the clamorous chimes. The
steeple rocks and reels, and far away the night is startled. Damp
turbulent west winds, rushing from the distant sea, and swirling up
the inland valleys, catch the sound, and toss it to and fro, and
bear it by gusts and snatches to watchers far away, upon bleak
moorlands and the brows of woody hills. Is there not something dim
and strange in the thought of these eight men meeting, in the heart
of a great city, in the narrow belfry-room, to stir a mighty sound
that shall announce to listening ears miles, miles away, the birth
of a new day, and tell to dancers, mourners, students, sleepers, and
perhaps to dying men, that Christ is born?

Let this association suffice for the time. And of our own Christmas
so much has been said and sung by better voices, that we may leave
it to the feelings and the memories of those who read the fireside
tales of Dickens, and are happy in their homes. The many elements
which I have endeavoured to recall, mix all of them in the Christmas
of the present, partly, no doubt, under the form of vague and
obscure sentiment; partly as time-honoured reminiscences, partly as
a portion of our own life. But there is one phase of poetry which we
enjoy more fully than any previous age. That is music. Music is of
all the arts the youngest, and of all can free herself most readily
from symbols. A fine piece of music moves before us like a living
passion, which needs no form or colour, no interpreting
associations, to convey its strong but indistinct significance. Each
man there finds his soul revealed to him, and enabled to assume a
cast of feeling in obedience to the changeful sound. In this manner
all our Christmas thoughts and emotions have been gathered up for us
by Handel in his drama of the 'Messiah.' To Englishmen it is almost
as well known and necessary as the Bible. But only one who has heard
its pastoral episode performed year after year from childhood in the
hushed cathedral, where pendent lamps or sconces make the gloom of
aisle and choir and airy column half intelligible, can invest this
music with long associations of accumulated awe. To his mind it
brings a scene at midnight of hills clear in the starlight of the
East, with white flocks scatte