When such music sweet their hearts and ears did greet,
As never was by mortal fingers strook;
Divinely-warbled voice answering the stringed noise,
As all their souls in blissful rapture took:

The air, such pleasure loth to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

13. Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,

If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the bass of Heaven's deep organ blow;
And, with your ninefold harmony,
Make up full concert to the angelic symphony.

14. For, if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled Vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

And lěprous Sin will melt from earthly mold;
And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

VII.

100. HYMN TO THE NATIVITY.

Y

PART SECOND.

EA, Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,

Mercy will sit between,

Throned in celestial sheen,

With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
And Heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

2. But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so;

The babe yet lies in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss,

So both himself and us to glorify.

Yet first, to those enchained in sleep,

The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,

1

3. With such a horrid clang
As on Mount Sinaï rang,

While the red fire and smould'ring clouds outbrake:
The aged earth aghast,

With terror of that blast,

Shall from the surface to the center shake;
When at the world's last session,

The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.
4. And then at last our bliss,
Full and perfect is,

But now begins; for, from this happy day,
The old dragon, underground,

In straiter limits bound,

Not half so far casts his usurped sway;
And, wroth to see his kingdom fail,

Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.

5. The oracles are dumb;

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo' from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving,
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

6. The lonely mountains ō'er,

And the resounding shōre,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses tōrn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

7. In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

Apollo, one of the principal future, a function which he exer gods of Grecian mythology. Homer

represents him as a revealer of the

cised especially at the temple of

Delphi.

2

The Lars' and Lēmūres mourn with midnight plaint.

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens3 at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.
8. Peör and Baälim⭑

Forsake their temples dim

With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
And moonèd Ashtoreth,*

Heaven's queen and mother bōth,

Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;

5

The Libyac Hammon shrinks his horn;

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz' mourn.

9. And sullen Moloch," fled,
Hath left in shadows dread

His burning idol all of blackest hue:
In vain with cymbals' ring
They call the grisly king,

In dismal dance about the furnace blue:
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.
10. Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian grove or green,

1 Lar (lår), plural la' rēz, though here pronounced lårz, a household deity among the Romans, regarded as the soul of a deceased ancestor.

2 Lěm ́ū rēš, though here pronounced lē mūrz, spirits or ghosts of the departed; specters.

3 Flā' men, a priest devoted to the service of one particular god.

4 Peor and Baalim, from Bääl, a Chaldean god, worshiped extensivcly in antiquity, even by the Israelites. Baäl, the male deity, was worshiped as the sun, and Ashtoreth, or Astarte, as the moon or "queen of night."

5 Hăm moa, same as Ammon, an

ancient god usually represented in the form of a ram, or a human being with the head of a ram.

6 Thăm muz, an ancient Syrian deity in honor of whom the idolatresses held an annual lamentation; the same with the Phenician Adonis.

' Mo' loch, the deity of the Ammonites to whom human sacrifices were offered in the valley of Tophet.

O si ris, one of the three deities to whom supreme honor was paid in ancient Egypt. The originator of civilization, in a contest with Typhon, or evil, he was slain and his dead body fitted into a chest, thrown into the Nile, and swept out to sea.