Chapter CIV: Christmastide again; and he hears the bells from

"A single church below the hill;"

this is at the place to which the family had moved, and the church is _Waltham Abbey church_. It is a fresh and strange locality, and the bells sound like strangers' voices, recalling nothing of his previous life; no memory can stray in the surrounding scenery;

"But all is new unhallow'd ground."

The Poet's mother lived for several years with her sister, Miss Fytche, in Well Walk, Hampstead; but this new home was at _High Beach, Epping Forest_.

CV.[74]

It is Christmas Eve, but the holly outside their new home shall stand ungathered. He deprecates repeating their old observances of this season in a new place. He thinks of his father's grave "under other snows" than those he looks on; and how the violet will blow there, "but we are gone."

What was done in the old home cannot be repeated in the new habitation,

"For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use."[75]

He would have this Christmas Eve kept with reverent solemnity: no joyous forms retained from which the spirit has gone; no music, dance, or motion,

"save alone
What lightens in the lucid East
Of rising worlds by yonder wood."

This _refers to the scintillation of the stars rising_. Let these run out their

"measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good;"

bringing Christ's second advent.