of the martyrs, in the maternal grief that so many buds of promise should never have opened upon her lap. "The office throughout the day was one of sorrow; in many places Gloria in Excelsis was not sung; in some not even the Gloria Patri." ""*

It is mentioned by Daniel that "in the more ancient Breviaries that had come under his observation, the Feast of the Holy Innocents had no hymns peculiar to itself; but its hymns are those of the Nativity or of the Common of Martyrs. This custom, however, did not prevail in all the churches; for, in the books of Wimpfelingius, Bebelius, Clichtovæus, and Cassander, our most beautiful hymn, Salvete Flores Martyrum, is expressly referred to that feast. It was originally compiled from a longer hymn on the Epiphany-Quicumque Christum quæritis-and the verses selected are not in every case the same." Its author was Prudentius, a distinguished Christian poet of the fourth century; and the following translation has the advantage of coming from the pen of the Rev. John Keble, by whom it was contributed to the Salisbury Hymnal. It has been lately republished in a volume of posthumous issue, entitled "Miscellaneous Poems."

Hail, martyr-flowers, who gleaming forth,
Just on the edge of your brief day,
By Christ's keen foe were swept from earth,
As rosebuds by the whirlwind's sway!

The first-fruits unto Christ are ye,

His lambs new-slain, a tender sort,

E'en by the shrine in childlike glee

Ye with your palms and garlands sport.

Ah! what avails so dire a doom?

What boots the stain on Herod's soul?

The One of many 'scapes the tomb,
The Christ is gone, unharmed and whole.

* Kalendar of the English Church.
+ Thesaurus Hymnologicus.

THE GOSPEL OF CHILDHOOD.

Far from their streaming blood who shared
His birth-hour, He at rest is laid:
The Virgin-born that steel hath spared,
Which many a matron childless made.

So did one child of yore elude

The wild laws of the wicked king,
With likeness of the Christ endued,

Ordained His people home to bring.

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If the claim of the Holy Innocents to the title of martyrs seem to be incomplete on account of their ignorance of the cause for which they involuntarily suffered, it may be fortified by the fitness of commemorating such members of a class who were always dear to the heart of Christ. Christianity is, indeed, a gospel of childhood; whose mission it is to recover to the man, hardened with the cares and the wisdom of the world, the tenderness and the guilelessness of infancy. "Wisdom," it has been said, and à fortiori the wisdom of God

"Wisdom is found with children at her knee."

The young take kindly to the kingdom of heaven. Life hangs loosely about the child; the torture of death-the twisting and wrenching asunder of an inveterate habit of living-comes upon the mature and the aged, for the love of life grows with its continuance. The unaccustomed soul, scarcely weaned from the milk of heaven, finds little to attract in the calculations of earth; whilst a long life, the youth of which is unrenewed by religion, becomes, day by day, more and more of a process by which it is unfitted for death-more and more of a burlesque procession from the infinite to bagatelle. "A certain Rabbin," writes Lord Bacon, "upon the text, 'Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams,' inferreth that young men are admitted nearer to God than old, because vision is a clearer revelation than a dream: and, certainly, the more a man drinketh of the world the more it intoxicateth: and

age doth profit rather in the powers of understanding than in the virtues of the will and affections."* When the natural youth of heart, and the connatural sympathy, is in danger of leaving a man, then is seen the practical philosophy of Christianity to offer a perpetual renewal and Jouvence; to fix eternally that which was in peril of vanishing for ever.

With no more particular introduction than this, we here transcribe Wordsworth's Ode, in which the bane and the antidote are both brought before the reader. It has for its subject and its title, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood;" and it is, we take leave to say, one of the most superb productions of the spirit of Christian Platonism which the world has seen.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen, I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed a glory from the earth.

THE DEPARTED GLORY.

To me alone there came a thought of grief,
But timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,
No more shall grief of mine the seasons wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay,

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May

Doth every beast keep holiday.

Thou child of joy

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Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy!

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in

your jubilee,

My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all.
Oh, evil day! if I were sullen

While the earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May morning,

And the children are pulling
On every side.

In a thousand valleys, far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm :-
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
-But there's a tree, of many one,

A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone.
pansy at my feet

The

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that riseth with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar :

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy ;

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A four years' darling of a pigmy size!
See where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part,