Cheering mother, cheering father,
From the Bible true;
Bring the holly, spread the feast,
Every heart to cheer,
Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,
A happy, bright New Year.”
Now, putting aside for the moment all questions touching the grounds of the conviction of the young people for whom these verses are intended of the truth of the Bible; or touching the propriety of their cheering their fathers and mothers by quotations from it; or touching the difficultly reconcileable merits of old times and new things; I call these verses bad, primarily, because they are not rhythmical. I consider good rhythm a moral quality. I consider the rhythm in these stanzas demoralized, and demoralizing. I quote, in opposition to them, one of the rhymes by which my own ear and mind were educated in early youth, as being more distinctly, and literally ‘moral,’ than that Christmas carol.
“Dame Wiggins of Lee
Was a worthy old soul,
As e’er threaded a nee-