Old-Timers on this list may remember this script, first recorded ten years
ago. It’s going out again, with the hopes that everyone has a great year
coming up and is, has,  or will be celebrating a great Christmas, Kwanzaa
or Channukah. We’ll get back to Lake Michigan sometime around the end of
the year.

David


Title: The Words Repeat

The year 1863 was nearing its end as the retired Harvard professor sat
down to the worktable in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, study. Taking a
pencil from amidst the stack of books, printers' proofs and other papers,
he began to write.

	I heard the bells on Christmas Day
	Their old familiar carols play,
	And wild and sweet
	The words repeat
	Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

	And thought how, as the day had come,
	The belfries of all Christendom
	Had rolled along
	The unbroken song
	Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

The past several years had not been kind, neither to the author nor to his
nation. In July of 1861 his second wife had been sealing locks of hair
belonging to their five children into packets as mementos. A drop of hot
wax ignited her light summer dress. Her husband had come running to her
side and severely burned his hands trying to beat down the flames. The
next day she was dead. He would later write to a friend, describing
himself as, "to the eyes of others, outwardly calm...inwardly bleeding to
death."

Also beginning to bleed inwardly, his country had gone to war that same
year. And now, two years later, in March, his oldest son Charley, 19, had
run off to join the Union Army. Notified of his son's efforts to enlist,
he reluctantly gave his permission. Charley was back home in June, now a
lieutenant, suffering from typhoid fever and malaria. He was still there
the following month, when 5,747 Americans were slaughtered in
north-central Pennsylvania. 27,000 were wounded, over 10,000 missing.

	Then from each black, accursed mouth
	The cannon thundered in the South,
	And with the sound
	The carols drowned
	Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

	It was as if an earthquake rent
	The hearth-stones of a continent,
	And made forlorn
	The households born
	Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Sufficiently recovered, Charley had returned to his unit in the middle of
August. The war dragged on, heading toward the New Year. Then, on December
first, the telegram came. A skirmish at New Hope Church, Virginia. The
bullet had entered Charley's left shoulder, traveled across his back,
missing the spine by an inch, and out the right shoulder. He had been
carried back to a hospital in Washington. His condition was grave. His
father and younger brother Ernest caught the next train south. The journey
must have seemed endless.

	And in despair I bowed my head;
	"There is no peace on earth," I said,
	"For hate is strong,
	And mocks the song
	Of peace on earth, good will to men!"

When the two arrived in the capital they found their way to the hospital.
The father gave the attendant his son's name, dreading the response.

Needlessly.

	Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
	God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
	The Wrong shall fail,
	The Right prevail,
	With peace on earth, good-will to men!

English organist and composer John Baptiste Calkin set the poem to music
nine years after it was published. And in Cambridge, nursed back to
health, Charles Appleton Longfellow would outlive his father Henry by
eleven years, dying in 1893.