Hi Everyone, in honor of the Holiday Season, we are taking a break from our usual Artifact Corner video. Today we will be looking at a poem published in the Plattsburgh Sentinel on December 25th, 1868. The poem is titled The Christmas Bells. If this sounds familiar, then you might be thinking of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also titled The Christmas Bells. But, this is a different poem, and sadly the author for this particular poem is not listed in the newspaper. Here is an excerpt from the poem from Christmas Day 1868:
The Bells – The bells – The Christmas Bells
How merrily they ring
As if they felt the joy they tell
To every human thing
The silvery tones – o’er vale and hill
Are swelling soft and clear
As wave on wave, the tide of sound
Fills the bright atmosphere.
The bells, the merry Christmas bells
Are ringing in the morn
They ring when in the eastern sky
The golden light is born.
They rang as sunshine tips the hills
And guilds the Village spire,
When through the sky, the sovereign sun
Rolls his full orb of fire.
The Christmas bells, the Christmas bells,
How merrily they ring!
To wary hearts, a pulse of joy,
A kindlier life they bring
The poor man on his couch of straw,
The rich on Downey bed
Hail the glad sounds, as voices sweet
Of angels overhead.
The bells, the silvery Christmas bells,
O’er many a mile they sound,
And household tones are answering them
In a thousand homes around
Voices of childhood blithe and shrill
With youths strong accents blend
and manhoods deep and earnest tones
with women’s praise ascend.
From all of us here at the Kent Delord House Museum, we wish you nothing but happiness this holiday season! Thank you for all of your support this year, and we look forward to seeing all of you again in the Spring. Thanks so much for stopping by!
Music: Holiday Atmospheric Symphonic
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license