Thomas K. Hervey - The Book of Christmas

frontispiece Christmas and His Children.

Title page

Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth allnight long.
Shakspeare.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1888.

DESCRIPTIVE OF THE
CUSTOMS, CEREMONIES, TRADITIONS,
SUPERSTITIONS, FUN, FEELING, AND FESTIVITIES OF

Title The Christmas Season

By THOMAS K. HERVEY.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. SEYMOUR.

man and woman carrying boxes on their backs Galantee Show.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1888.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

We take no note of time
But from its loss; to give it, then, a tongue
Is wise in man.
Dr. Young.

To give a language to time, for the preservation of its records and the utterance of its lessons, has been amongst the occupations of man from the day when first he found himself in its mysterious presence down to these latter ages of the world; and yet, all the resources of his ingenuity, impelled by all the aspirations of his heart, have only succeeded in supplying it with an imperfect series of hieroglyphics, difficult in their acquirement and uncertain in their use. Ages upon ages of the young world have passed away, of which the old hath no chronicle. Generations after generations of men have "made their bed in the darkness," and left no monuments. Of the crowded memorials reared by others along the stream of time, many (and those the mightiest) are written in a cipher of which the key is lost. The wrappings of the mummy are letters of a dead language; and no man can translate the ancient story of the pyramid!

We have learnt to speak of time, because it is that portion of eternity with which we have presently to do,as if it were a whit more intelligible (less vague, abstract, and unimaginable) than that eternity of which it is a part. He who can conceive of the one, must be able to embrace the awful image of the other. We think of time as of a section of eternity, separated and intrenched by absolute limits; and thus we seem to have arrived at a definite idea, surrounded by points on which the mind can rest. But when the imagination sets out upon the actual experiment, and discovers that those limits are not assignable, save on one only side, and finds but a single point on which to rest its failing wing, and looks from thence along an expanse whose boundaries are nowhere else within the range of its restricted vision,then does the mortal bird return into its mortal nest, wearied with its ineffectual flight, and convinced that a shoreless ocean and one whose shores it cannot see are alike formless and mysterious to its dim and feeble gaze.

And yet notwithstanding the connection of these two ideas,of time and of eternity,(the notion of the former being only reached through the latter) we deal familiarly, and even jestingly, with the one, while the mind approaches the other with reverential awe. Types, and symbols, and emblemsand those ever of a grave meaningare the most palpable expressions which we venture to give to our conceptions of the one; whilst the other we figure and personify,and that, too often, after a fashion in which the better part of the moral is left unrepresented. Yet who shall personify time? And who that has ever tried it, in the silence of his chamber and the stillness of his heart, hath not bowed down in breathless awe before the solemn visions which his conjuration has awakened? Oh, the mysterious shapes which Time takes, when it rises up into the mind as an image, at those hours of lonely inquisition!"And he said unto her, 'What form is he of?' And she said, 'An