Or now, I
learn with bitter tears how poor Jane Shore, dressed all in white,
and with her brown hair hanging down, went starving through the
streets; or how George Barnwell killed the worthiest uncle that
ever man had, and was afterwards so sorry for it that he ought to
have been let off. Comes swift to comfort me, the
Pantomime—stupendous Phenomenon!—when clowns are shot from loaded
mortars into the great chandelier, bright constellation that it is;
when Harlequins, covered all over with scales of pure gold, twist
and sparkle, like amazing fish; when Pantaloon (whom I deem it no
irreverence to compare in my own mind to my grandfather) puts
red-hot pokers in his pocket, and cries “Here’s somebody coming!”
or taxes the Clown with petty larceny, by saying, “Now, I sawed you
do it!” when Everything is capable, with the greatest ease, of
being changed into Anything; and “Nothing is, but thinking makes it
so.” Now, too, I perceive my first experience of the dreary
sensation— often to return in after-life—of being unable, next day,
to get back to the dull, settled world; of wanting to live for ever
in the bright atmosphere I have quitted; of doting on the little
Fairy, with the wand like a celestial Barber’s Pole, and pining for
a Fairy immortality along with her. Ah, she comes back, in many
shapes, as my eye wanders down the branches of my Christmas Tree,
and goes as often, and has never yet stayed by me!
Out of this delight springs the toy-theatre,—there it is, with its familiar proscenium, and ladies in feathers, in the boxes!—and all its attendant occupation with paste and glue, and gum, and water colours, in the getting-up of The Miller and his Men, and Elizabeth, or the Exile of Siberia. In spite of a few besetting accidents and failures (particularly an unreasonable disposition in the respectable Kelmar, and some others, to become faint in the legs, and double up, at exciting points of the drama), a teeming world of fancies so suggestive and all-embracing, that, far below it on my Christmas Tree, I see dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time, adorned with these associations as with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers, and charming me yet.
But hark! The Waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the Tree, Christmas associations cluster thick. School-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries, long disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more, in an arena of huddled desks and forms, all chipped, and notched, and inked; cricket-bats, stumps, and balls, left higher up, with the smell of trodden grass and the softened noise of shouts in the evening air; the tree is still fresh, still gay. If I no more come home at Christmas-time, there will be boys and girls (thank Heaven! ) while the World lasts; and they do! Yonder they dance and play upon the branches of my Tree, God bless them, merrily, and my heart dances and plays too!
And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should.