30
on._
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 little left,
And none abroad; there was no anchor, none,
To hold by." Francis, laughing, clapt his hand
On Everard's shoulder with, "I hold by him."
"And I," quoth Everard, "by the wassail-bowl."
"Why, yes," I said, "we knew your gift that way
At college; but another which you had,
I mean of verse (for so we held it then),
What came of that?" "You know," said Frank, "he burnt
His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books,"--
And then to me demanding why? "Oh, sir,
He thought that nothing new was said, or else
Something so said 'twas not