an's fire,
Together to go to plough and to sow,
To get us both food and array,
And thus with content the time we have spent
To drive the cold winter away.

WINTER'S DELIGHTS.

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze,
And cups o'erflow with wine;
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love,
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep's leaden spells remove.

The time doth well dispense
With lovers' long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well:
Some, measures comely tread,
Some, knotted riddles tell,
Some, poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.

_Thomas Campion._

A CHRISTMAS CATCH.

To shorten winter's sadness,
See where the nymphs with gladness
Disguised all are coming,
Right wantonly a-mumming.
Fa la.

Whilst youthful sports are lasting,
To feasting turn our fasting;
With revels and with wassails
Make grief and care our vassals.
Fa la.

For youth it well beseemeth
That pleasure he esteemeth;
And sullen age is hated
That mirth would have abated.
Fa la.

_Thomas Weelkes, A.D. 1597._

THE EPIC.

At Francis Allen's on the Christmas eve,--
The game of forfeits done--the girls all kissed
Beneath the sacred bush and past away,--
The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,
The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,
Then half-way ebbed: and there we held a talk,
How all the old honor had from Christmas gone,
Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd games
In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out
With cutting eights that day upon the pond,
Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,
I bumped the ice into three several stars,
Fell in a doze; and, half-awake, I heard
The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,
Now harping on the church-commissioners,
Now hawking at geology and schism;
Until I woke, and found him settled down
Upon the general decay of faith
Right through the world; "at home was li