DECEMBER. 
How like a winter hath my absence been 
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! 
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen ! 
What old December’s bareness everywhere ! 
And yet this time removed was summer’s time, 
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, 
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, 
Like widow’d wombs after their lord’s decease : 
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me 
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit; 
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, 
And, thou away, the very birds are mute ; 
Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer 
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. 
Sonnet xcvii. 
D ECEMBER chill and frosty, no matter though 
the sky be blue and the short arc’d sun be 
shining. It is a time for the death of things, a 
harbinger of winter near, the advent hymn of Nature 
prophetic of a new awakening into life, when the 
dainty decking of her nakedness has passed, when 
the white snow mantle is dissolved away and the 
crystal jewellery falls from the branches of tree and 
shrub. 
Within doors it is also a time of preparation, a 
time for laying in Christmas store and making 
Christmas fare, a time for kneading the Christmas 
pudding, in which all must have their share “for 
luck,” and of compounding mince-meat; and since 
flowers we have none, save, perhaps, a few chrysan- 
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