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Rejoice, rejoice, dearest sons, with very sweet weeping for thanksgiving, before the Highest Eternal Father, not calling yourselves content with this, but praying Him that soon may be raised the gonfalon of the most holy Cross. Rejoice, exult, in Christ sweet Jesus; let our hearts break, seeing the largess of the infinite goodness of God. Now peace is made, despite him who would hinder it.
But would it be so sweet a remembrance, that of lying on a marble couch, under a golden-faced roof, and within doors of citron-wood and ivory, and sailing in that state to greet queens who are mummies now, as that of seeing those fair figures, standing under the great gonfalon, themselves as lovely as Egyptian belles, and going to see more than Egypt dreamed?
The poplars twinkled innumerably, the long Este gonfalon flacked and strained in the wind. Spectators with soldiery to hedge them kept a wide square about the plain. From their side the figures in the midst the red, gold, and white about the pavilion, the steel of the soldiers, the drooping women between them were about as real as a handful of marionettes.
Now whiles they sat thus in talk, up rose the sun, before whose joyous beams the stealthy mists slunk away little by little, until Beltane beheld Duke Ivo's mighty camp long lines of tents gay with fluttering pennon and gonfalon, of huts and booths set well out of bowshot behind the works of contravallation stout palisades and barriers with earthworks very goodly and strong.
The sight of the dyer, running forward with blood-red arms and axe uplifted, and with his cluster of rough companions behind him, had a stimulating effect on the crowd. Not that he did anything else than pass beyond the soldiers and thrust himself well among his fellow-citizens, flourishing his axe; but he served as a stirring symbol of street-fighting, like the waving of a well-known gonfalon.
"A man may feel good only by feeling better. . . . Pleasure is ever in the company and contrast of pain; for instance, in thirsting and drinking, the pleasure of the one is the exact measure of the pain of the other, and they cease precisely together otherwise the patient would drink more. The black and yellow gonfalon of Lucifer is indispensable in any spiritual picture."
At the head of these rode the Tribune in complete armour, and wearing on his casque a wreath of oak and olive leaves, wrought in silver. Before him waved the great gonfalon of Rome, while in front of this multitudinous array marched a procession of monks, of the order of St. Roman War-song. March, march for your hearths and your altars!
Next follow great lanterns of strung glass drops, accompanied by soldiers; then an immense gonfalon representing the Virgin at the Cross, which swings backwards and forwards, borne by the confraternita of the parish, with blue capes over their white dresses, and all holding torches.
One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and Man out of the dust of the Earth.
Pale and erect he stood neither fear, nor anger, nor menace but deep grief and high resolve upon his features! A momentary shame a momentary awe seized the crowd. He pointed to the Gonfalon, wrought with the Republican motto and arms of Rome, and thus he began: "I too am a Roman and a Citizen; hear me!"
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