And ye, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow--
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing:
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophet-bards foretold,
When with the ever-circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1834.

TWO FAMOUS CHRISTMAS HYMNS AND THEIR AUTHOR

To be the writer of one great hymn classic on the nativity is an enviable
distinction, but to be the author of two immortal Christmas lyrics is
fame that has probably come to only one man, and he an American. His name
was Edmund Hamilton Sears, and so long as Christians celebrate Christmas,
they will sing the two hymns he wrote--"It came upon a midnight clear"
and "Calm on the listening ear of night."

Strangely enough, an interval of sixteen years separated the writing of
the two hymns. Sears had just graduated from Union College at the age of
twenty-four when he wrote "Calm on the listening ear of night." It
appeared in the "Boston Observer," and was immediately recognized as a
poem of unusual merit. Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of it as "one of the
finest and most beautiful hymns ever written."

Sixteen years elapsed, and then at Christmas time in 1850 the Christian
world was delighted to find in the "Christian Register" another lyric,
"It came upon the midnight clear," which many believe is superior to the
earlier hymn. The language of this hymn is so surpassingly lovely and its
movement so rhythmical, it fairly sings itself.

There is, in fact, a close resemblance between the two hymns, and yet
they are different. While the earlier hymn is largely descriptive, the
later one is characterized by a note of joyous optimism and triumphant
faith. In Sears' "Sermons and Songs" he published the one at the
beginning, and the other at the close, of a sermon for Christmas Eve on 1
Tim. 2:6.

Each of the two hymns had five stanzas in its original form. The fourth
stanza of the older hymn is usually omitted. It reads:

Light on thy hills, Jerusalem!
The Saviour now is born;
More bright on Bethlehem's joyo