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Glittering orders were flashing on many uniforms, their banners were embroidered with golden lilies; each noble had his servants arrayed in silver-laced livery, and the French bands of many fifes, horns, and cymbals, played such music as was never heard before.
Had Widdicombe been struck by a thunderbolt he could not have flown faster or farther from his saddle. Two full somersaults did he make, his plates clanging like cymbals, ere he lay prone upon his back. For a moment the King looked grave at that prodigious fall. Then smiling once more as Widdicombe staggered to his feet, he clapped his hands loudly in applause.
On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only with her hair, frightful with thinness and old age, some beggar of the road to Pistoia, burned by the suns and the snows, whom some unknown precursor of Donatello had moulded. And everywhere were Miss Bell's chosen arms-bells and cymbals. The largest lifted their bronze clappers at the angles of the room; others formed a chain at the foot of the walls.
"'Lord of Crestlands, an ancestral estate in the proud old dominion of Virginia, sounds rich and grand," laughed Abner; "but is only as 'sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, after all, without money to lift mortgages and to repair the breaches made by the prodigality and carelessness of my predecessors.
"Why, Esther, heard you ever the like? Surely, I have on me the passion of a singer, the heat of blood and the thrill of Miriam and David. In my thoughts, which should be those of a plain worker in figures and facts, there is a confusion of cymbals clashing and harp-strings loud beaten, and the voices of a multitude standing around a new-risen throne.
Those sonorous phrases, whose echoes had just died away, sounded as false as a strolling band. The word "liberty" rolled like the bass-drum, "public interests" and "welfare of the State" clanged discordantly like the cymbals, and when the comedian spoke of his "patriotism" I almost heard the couac of a clarionet. A long uproar woke me from my revery.
Yonder a child thrown to the ground screamed shrilly, there a dog trodden under the feet of the crowd howled piteously. So clear and resonant were the shouts of joy that they rose high above the flutes and tambourines, the cymbals and lutes of the musicians, who followed the man approaching in the robes of a god.
A thud of unseen hoofs first set us aquiver; then a crash of cymbals, a jangle of bells, a hoarse applauding roar, and Coralie was in the midst of us, whirling past 'twixt earth and sky, now erect, flushed, radiant, now crouched to the flowing mane; swung and tossed and moulded by the maddening dance-music of the band.
"Am I sure of what?" inquired the Jack, as he swung to and fro on the spring which made him pop out of the box. "Are you sure we are alone?" went on the Soldier. "It would be too bad if we should come to life when any one could see us." "There is no one in the department but us toys," said a Calico Clown, and he banged together some shiny cymbals on the ends of his arms.
Longfellow in his Drinking Song thus describes the march of Bacchus: "Fauns with youthful Bacchus follow; Ivy crowns that brow, supernal As the forehead of Apollo, And possessing youth eternal. "Round about him fair Bacchantes, Bearing cymbals, flutes and thyrses, Wild from Naxian groves or Zante's Vineyards, sing delirious verses." It was in vain Pentheus remonstrated, commanded, and threatened.
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