Ages and ages ago,
In the turbid waters of life, a Name
Was dropped like a pebble from heights we only know
By the widening rings of power that round it flow
In waves of resounding praise, that are more than fame.
It lives in the myriad voice of prayer and song,
And in cathedral thunders that the fretted vaults prolong.
It rocks our windy steeples
With a merry midnight chime;
In the love-feast of all peoples,
Who, from remotest time, have sunned a wintry clime
With their free, glad hearts – that Name survives,
A pledge of loving, happy lives;
And the new faith holds its state,
Throned over the same old joy,
Though the yule-log turns to a glowing grate,
And the Lord of Misrule is a frolic Boy.
Ages and ages ago,
In the dusk of a shadowy cave,
Where a lone lamp shed a pallid glow
On a Mother’s pallid face – how sweet and grave:
While the thronging lives of the caravan,
Camel and camelier, horse and man,
Their wearied limbs to slumber gave,
Was born a Baby – that miracle that weeps
And smiles and wonders, and coos and sleeps,
Borne out of the vast Unknown,
Where the veiled Eternal Worker works invisible and alone!
O’er the baby a jewel star burned bright
On the swarthy bosom of brooding night, –
The great, brown, brooding nurse, with her eyes of liquid light
It shone companionless on high,
And the wise men of the East – prophet, and king and priest, –
Grave Magi, who read in the constellate sky
The rescripts of fate – behold from afar
That strange and unrecorded star,
And awed by its radiance splendid,
They knew that a cycle had ended,
And the fatal shadow of woe and crime
Had been swept back a space on the dial-plate of time!
Then the true Golden Age began,
The apotheosis of Man;
And over the gods of old renown
Whose altars smoked with blood and brand,
Pure love had reared another throne
In the human heart, and set her crown
On child and mother, forever to stand
As the holiest symbols of that great love
Which serves and suffers here, and reigns supreme above.
Oh, the centuries have grown gray
And shrivelled and crumbled away,
And the empires of man have gone down to an unrelenting tomb,
Since the star of the Christ-child rose
On the night of our mortal woes,
And ever and ever its clear beams shone
With a menace of doom,
On blood-dripping altar and throne,
Where the knitted brows of hate shed terror and gloom;
And ever and ever its glories shine
On a freer realm and a holier shrine,
The golden Morning Star of Humanity divine!
Eternal Mother, eternal Child,
Forever renewed as the years go by,
In you the severed are reconciled,
The yonder and here, the far with the near,
The then and the now, and the low with the high,
Forever and ever, in lands and ages near,
The Christ-child is born when the heart of man beats true.
Have ye not seen His star in our own dull sky
Where a famishing woman with fair, sweet face –
Too sad and wan for its native grace –
Wrestles with hunger, deep into the night,
And keeps her soul white,
Though the gold of the villain half dazzles her sight?
In the cabins of poor men, the human hives
That swarm with young lives,
Where the mother lies cold that the babe may be warm,
And the strong help the weak and the scanty Yule-feast
Is portioned inversely, the most to the least,
Within there is frolic, without may be storm,
And we see – though they see not, – a sweet baby form,
The bonny Krist Kindlein the light of that swarm.
Ah, did we not see the ruddier light
Of his natal star, reborn
In swart, rough bosoms of stalwart might,
Through the glare of that fatal morn,
When the all-devouring flame
On a band of happy maidens came?
It was hell behind them whose red tongues broke
Through the smothering smoke!
And before them the terrible leap;
When down with a sickening cry, to live, or less wretched, to die,
They dashed their fair young lives to earth, in a shuddering, mangled heap!
Merciful heaven! Is there none to save?
Ah, yes; thy human is still divine.
Through the rifts of the cabin thy star-beams shine;
‘Tis the manger still that bears
The deliverer tender and brave –
The unshrinking heart that dares, and the generous will to save.
Were the strong arms swarthy with labor and the kiss of an alien sun?
O God! but they were wrought with no alien thought,
And their deeds were nobly done.*
Not in the lowly cot alone
The crowned humanity hath its throne;
A thousand tender hearts to-day,
In homes of beauty and soft array,
Have lapped the Krist Kindlein in purple and gold.
With the angels’ old refrain,
As they scattered genial gifts to the hungry and cold,
And loosed into smiles the rigid lips of pain;
For now and forever his orient star
Hangs over the roof where the pure and the merciful are.
Das Krist Kringlein