mber,
Holy angels guard thy bed!
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently falling on thy head.

* * * * *

Soft and easy is thy cradle;
Coarse and hard thy Saviour lay.
When His birthplace was a stable,
And His softest bed was hay.

* * * * *

Lo He slumbers in His manger
Where the horned oxen fed;
--Peace, my darling, here's no danger;
Here's no ox a-near thy bed."{45}

It is to the eighteenth century that the three most popular of English
Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate's "While shepherds watched their
flocks by night"--one of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms)
in common use in the Anglican Church before the nineteenth century--is a
bald and apparently artless paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some
accident, has attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and
noble tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley's "Hark, the herald angels
sing," or--as it should be--"Hark, how all the welkin rings," is much
admired by some, but to the present writer seems a mere piece of
theological rhetoric. Byrom's "Christians, awake, salute the happy morn,"
has the stiffness and formality or its period, but it is not without a
certain quaintness and dignity. One could hardly expect fine Christmas
poetry of an age whose religion was on the one hand staid, rational,
unimaginative, and on the other "Evangelical" in the narrow sense,
finding its centre in the Atonement rather than the Incarnation.

The revived mediaevalism, religious and aesthetic, of the nineteenth
century, produced a number of Christmas carols. Some, like Swinburne's
"Three damsels in the queen's chamber," with |85| its exquisite verbal
music and delightful colour, and William Morris's less successful
"Masters, in this hall," and "Outlanders, whence come ye last?" are the
work of unbelievers and bear witness only to the aesthetic charm of the
Christmas story; but there are others, mostly from Roman or
Anglo-Catholic sources, of real religious inspiration.[34] The most
spontaneous are Christina Rossetti's, whose haunting rhythms and delicate
feeling are shown at their best in her songs of the Christ Child. More
studied and self-conscious are the austere Christmas verses of Lionel
Johnson and the graceful carols of Professor Selwyn Image. In one poem
Mr. Image strikes a deeper and stronger note than elsewhere; its s