Ah! glorious Maid, dost thou not guess
  What guerdon thy chaste soul shall bless,
  How by thy ripening pangs is bought
  An honour greater than all thought?

  O what a load of joy untold
  Thy womb inviolate doth hold! 
  Of thee a golden age is born,
  The brightness of the earth’s new morn!

  Hearken! doth not the infant’s wail
  The universal springtide hail? 
  For now the world re-born lays by
  Its gloomy, frost-bound apathy.

  Methinks in all her rustic bowers
  The earth is spread with clustering flowers: 
  Odours of nard and nectar sweet
  E’en o’er the sands of Syrtes fleet.

  All places rough and deserts wild
  Have felt from far Thy coming, Child: 
  Rocks to Thy gentle empire bow
  And verdure clothes the mountain brow.

  Sweet honey from the boulder leaps: 
  The sere and leafless oak-bough weeps
  A strange rich attar:  tamarisks too
  Of balsam pure distil the dew.

  Blessed for ever, cradle dear,
  The lowly stall, the cavern drear! 
  Men to this shrine, Eternal King,
  With dumb brutes adoration bring.

  The ox and ass in homage low
  Obedient to their Maker bow: 
  Bows too the unlearn’d heartless crowd
  Whose minds the sensual feast doth cloud.

  Though, by the faithful Spirit impelled,
  Shepherds and brutes, unreasoning held,
  Yea, folk that did in darkness dwell
  Discern their God in His poor cell: 

  Yet children of the sacred race
  Blindly abhor the Incarnate grace: 
  By philtres you might deem them lulled
  Or by some bacchic phrenzy dulled.

  Why headlong thus to ruin stride? 
  If aught of soundness in you bide,
  Behold in Him the Lord divine
  Of all your patriarchal line.

  Mark you the dim-lit cave, the Maid,
  The humble nurse, the cradle laid,
  The helpless infancy forlorn: 
  Yet thus the Gentiles’ King was born!

  Ah sinner, thou shalt one day see
  This Child in dreadful majesty,
  See Him in glorious clouds descend,
  While thou thy guilty heart shalt rend.

  Vain all thy tears, when loud shall sound
  The trump, when flames shall scorch the ground,
  When from its hinge the cloven world
  Is loosed, in horrid tumult hurled.

  Then throned on high, the Judge of all
  Shall mortals to their reckoning call: 
  To these shall grant the prize of light,
  To those Gehenna’s gloomy night.

Then, Israel, shalt thou learn at length
The Cross hath, as the lightning, strength: 
Doomed by thy wrath, He now is Lord,
Whom Death once grasped but soon restored.

XII.  HYMNUS EPIPHANIAE

  Quicumque Christum quaeritis,

oculos in altum tollite,
illic licebit visere
signum perennis gloriae.