"'The mother she made the child a bath,
How lovely then therein it sate;
The childling so platched with its hand
That the water out of the beaker sprang.'[2]
[2] The version is, of course, as nearly literal as possible.
"But sometimes these religious poetical feelings impress themselves so deeply in their subject, that the descriptions verge closely upon the ludicrous:
"'Mary did not herself prepare
With cradle-clothes to her hand there,
In which her dear child to wind.
Soon as Joseph this did find,