almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it
not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable
as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of
morning--ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that
famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight
hush--methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music--

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale,
pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here
and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the
memory of the pious--the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking
from one of many domes--from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen--and
in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters
of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy
night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native
growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and
meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood
which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of
old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that
Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed
such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination
spiritualised--a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How
sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our
hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had
loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that
rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of
youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,--our eyes fixed all the
while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears--and in the setting sunlight we behold
mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more
beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all
its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of
Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to
dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow--

"Nodding the