"Now is the time of Christmas come"
A garland of forgotten carols from a 19th-century short story
Each Christmas, I keep a mini-tradition of my own: finding a new Christmas story from the public domain to read. Over the last decade and more I’ve read short stories, novellas, and short novels from the Victorian and Edwardian eras that range from magical to forgettable and everything in between.
A few years ago one of my picks was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Ten Christmas Stories by Edward Everett Hale. A bit of a mixed bag overall, the collection does feature a couple of very good stories—the best of them being “Christmas Waits in Boston,” in which a minister takes a sleigh full of children caroling on Christmas Eve, and the lives of several people they serenade or encounter become serendipitously intertwined.
Re-reading this story last year, something interesting struck me: of over a dozen hymns and carols quoted or referenced in the text, I didn’t recognize a single one. Even as a Christian who has always been interested in history, music, and literature…not one, out of fourteen songs! Yet the casual way in which they were referenced by the author seemed to assume that they would be familiar to the average reader in 1872.
This intrigued me. So I decided to do some digging and see how many of these carols I could identify. And here is what I found:
First quoted is “Carol, Carol, Christians” (1840) by American Episcopal bishop and sometime poet Arthur Cleveland Cox.
Next comes “Shepherd of tender sheep,” which is a slight misquotation or a different translation of “Shepherd of tender youth” (ca. 200) by Clement of Alexandria. Hymnary.org describes it as the “earliest Christian hymn attributed to an identifiable author”; the English translation was made in 1846 by Henry Martyn Dexter.
“Hail to the night, hail to the day” is probably “Hail the night, all hail the morn” (ca. 1837). An anonymous carol; according to John Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology from 1907, it was often listed as “from the German,” though the original German carol is unknown.
“Now is the time of Christmas come” is a line from the traditional English carol “The Three Kings” (traditional/15th-16th century?), also known as “I Would Now Sing For and I Might.” In Joshua Sylvester’s A Garland of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1861) it is described as “written in the reign of Henry VII.”
“Jesus in his babes abiding” is the first line of “Holy Places and Things” (ca. 1846) by John Keble.
“Nor war nor battle sound” appears to be “No war nor battle’s sound” from “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629) by John Milton.
“Welcome be thou, heavenly King” is from “Welcome Yule” (15th century), a traditional English carol.
Next is “King of Glory, King of Peace” (1633) by George Herbert.
Then comes “Was Not Christ Our Savior” (16th century) by Thomas Tusser, an Englishman whose life fascinatingly combined the professions of farmer, chorister, and poet (his most famous work was A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, a long poem on the subject of farming and country life).
A full three verses of “It Was the Calm and Silent Night” (1837) by Alfred Domett are quoted in Hale’s story—there are five verses altogether. The English-born Domett was a close friend of Robert Browning’s before emigrating to New Zealand, where he eventually became the country’s fourth premier. This poem, also known as “A Christmas Hymn,” was originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1837.
“When Anna took the baby,” which Hale refers to as “a scrap of old Ephrem the Syrian,” seems to be derived from his “Hymn IV on the Nativity of Christ” (4th century).
There are three more quotations in the story that I have been unable to identify—all internet searches of the phrases only bring up the text of Hale’s story. Given the fact that Hale slightly misquoted some of the other carols, the same thing could be getting in the way of an accurate search for these three. I’d love to know if anybody else recognizes them or is able to trace them to their source:
“The waiting world was still”
“Hear the song, and see the Star”
“…the star, the manger, and the Child”
Any suggestions?
I would surmise that Herbert’s “King of Glory, King of Peace,” is probably the most recognizable title from this list today. (It was sung at the National Service of Thanksgiving to mark the late Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2016.) Names like Milton and Keble are familiar, but I’ll wager few of us have ever sung their compositions, let alone those of the more obscure authors quoted by Hale. Certainly none of them were in the hymn book used by the church where I spent most of my childhood (though happily it was still a church that sung mostly hymns, rather than just 20th-century “choruses” and “praise songs”).
On the other hand, three from the list are included in Sylvester’s A Garland of Carols, Ancient and Modern (just one of many nineteenth-century anthologies of carols), alongside many more that are doubtless unfamiliar to modern Christians, and a handful that are, such as “Joy to the World,” “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks,” “The First Noel,” (under the title “For Christmas Day in the Morning”) and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (though curiously Sylvester makes no reference to Charles Wesley’s original authorship or George Whitfield’s adaptation).
Sylvester’s introduction to the anthology includes a charming reminiscence of experiencing the tradition of caroling during a Christmas spent in the English countryside “some years ago”:
…The little cottage on the road-side had its sprigs of holly in the window, and ruddy children stood at the door with faces that betokened how near was the general holiday. As I drew towards my destination I occasionally passed a peasant carrying the, to him, sumptuous meal for the morrow, — perhaps the bountiful gift of the good lady at the manor-house — or bearing on his shoulder a block to light up his cottage hearth in honour of Christmas-tide. I could not help thinking, as I moved along, that on the eve of this glorious day all nature seemed to sink into repose after the labours and storms of the past year.
The quiet village of Seven Oaks exhibited that neat and cleanly aspect so often admired by visitors to this country when passing through our more orderly rural districts. The trimmed hedge-rows, whitened door-steps, and glistening window-panes, with the prim and happy old people passing about making preparations for the morrow, pictured forth a delightful scene of order and contentment.
Fatigued with my walk, I retired to rest early. A bright moon was shining into my chamber, and through the window I could see lights moving about the apartments of Knowle House1, a short distance across the park, indicating that the great people were also preparing for the mirthful time. I had not been in the room very long before my ears were saluted by a sweet music of youthful voices. Opening the casement I found some young villagers singing a Carol. The tune was plaintive, and simple in the extreme, and appeared to harmonize exactly with the scene and the occasion. It was the old Carol of “God rest you Merry Gentlemen,” and if a critic should aver that the piece was more appropriate for the following day, I can only say that the melody sounded very delightful on that still and frosty night. After a time the little folks withdrew, and I heard their voices in the distance, apparently not far from a neighbouring farm house. As Irving2 remarked on a similar occasion, the notes of the Carolists as they receded became more soft and aerial, and seemed to accord with quiet and moonlight. I listened and listened ; they became more and more tender and remote ; and, as they gradually died away, my head sunk upon my pillow, and I fell asleep.
Following a short survey of the history of Christmas carols, Sylvester notes regretfully that in his day, “fashions have changed, and tastes have altered; and in this age of giddy excitement people appear to prefer novelty and flippant amusement to the innocent and delightful pastime of their ancient fathers.”
The remark seems a little premature, since the caroling tradition was apparently alive and well in America when Hale wrote “Christmas Waits in Boston” eleven years later. But it would certainly apply a half-century or a century later. Somewhere in that time our forgetfulness of all but a relatively small number of the most popular carols seems to have accelerated as well.
Looking at it from another angle, however, we who live in the modern era are fortunate. We have all the riches of past centuries’ poetry, hymns, and carols to draw upon; we can browse through them and discover and learn and sing whatever we choose. All the work of 19th-century anthologists in collecting and preserving them is—at least in the present moment—merely a click away at places like Internet Archive. But neither technology nor access to it can ever be considered as wholly certain or permanent (the Internet Archive’s recent outage should serve as a healthy warning in that direction). We can be happily grateful for how it has benefited us so far…but we should never forget that the best way to preserve songs—not just the words and the notes, but the love and enjoyment of them—is by singing them.
“Under the full moon, on the snow still white, with sixteen children at the happiest, and with the blessed memories of the best the world has ever had, there can be nothing better than two or three such hours.”
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Now a National Trust property in Kent.
This must be a reference to Irving’s delightful Old Christmas, which Sylvester’s reminiscences had already reminded me of.
A very interesting article. I wonder if ‘the waiting world was still’ is a mis-memory of the line ‘the world in solemn stillness lay’ from the carol ‘It came upon a midnight clear’, written in 1849?