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Updated: June 6, 2025
For all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually between heaven and this dark earth of ours. Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past, there is one more question to consider, though with brevity.
Four hundred years ago, this chapel was filled with ornaments of gold cloth and silk, censers, chandeliers, chalices, crosses, precious stones, gold vessels and vases, a choir of thirty singers, chaplains, musicians, and children sang hymns to the accompaniment of an organ which they took along with them when they travelled. They were clad in scarlet garments lined with pearl grey and vair.
Meanwhile the sheep's flesh in the great caldron was quite done, and the robbers sat down to eat. The caldron was lowered on to the outspread skins, which served as tablecloth and napkin, and the robbers carved for themselves with their huge clasp-knives. But if their meat was coarse and their table rude, their drinking vessels were magnificent. They consisted of gold and silver chalices and pocals, the spoil of many a church and castle, and as often as a robber took a draught he drank to the memory of some comrade or other who had ended a glorious career on the wheel, gallows, or stake, winding up with a full recital of the deceased's exploits e.
Of these there were thousands; and their tall flower-stalks, fifteen, twenty feet high, set thick with the shining, smooth seed-cups, glistened like satin chalices in the sun. Below hundreds of feet below lay the canon bottom, a solid bed of chaparral, looking soft and even as a bed of moss.
Pius V., to whom Ridolfi had opened the whole matter, highly approved the scheme, and warmly urged Philip's cooperation. Poor and ruined as he was himself; the Pope protested that he was ready to sell his chalices, and even his own vestments, to provide funds for the cause. Philip had replied that few words were necessary to persuade him.
The great crucifix over the altar was of solid silver, and the chalices and incense-burners were of pure gold. He had, besides, a fine organ, which he caused to be carried from one castle to another, on the shoulders of six men, whenever he changed his residence. He kept up a choir of twenty-five young children of both sexes, who were instructed in singing by the first musicians of the day.
A great Victorian painter had lived in this house, which now was destined to figure again in history as the home of the greater Paul Mario. He glanced around the cosy room, in which there were many bowls and vases holding tulips, those chalices of tears beloved of Hafiz, and he suppressed a little sigh. "May I light a pipe before I go, Yvonne?" he asked.
There were girls with eyes full of liquid light, with dainty bonnets nestling on their soft hair; their faces were like petals of flowers; the curves of their chins were more beautiful than chalices of lilies; their dresses, soft, shapely, of exquisite tones and texture, draped their perfect bodies. Their slender fingers held gold-and-pearl opera glasses.
At daybreak next day, the mob swept upon the churches and stripped them to the very walls. Pictures, statues; organs, ornaments, chalices of silver and gold, reliquaries, albs, chasubles, copes, ciboriea, crosses, chandeliers, lamps; censers, all of richest material, glittering with pearls, rubies, and other precious stones, were scattered in heaps of ruin upon the ground.
We carried with us our tent, our chalices, and ornaments, and all that was necessary for saying mass. The lord of the village, who, like other persons of quality throughout AEthiopia, lived on the top of a mountain, received us with very great civility.
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