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D'Alton felt it very keenly. She had not, like him, drank the cup of life's pleasures till it tasted insipid or even nauseous; on the contrary, she looked on the pomps and vanities of society as only a woman can look on them, and now that she was legally respectable, and rich enough to keep pace with even the most fashionable of her neighbors, it made her very heart ache to think that these scenes of brightness were closed to her as much as ever.
"She saw with sensible delight the relics of the pomps of this world disappear one after another, and alms-giving taught her to retrench daily something fresh.... A person so delicate and sensible had suffered for twelve entire years, and almost without an interval, either the most vivid anguish or languor exhausting alike to mind and body; and notwithstanding, during the whole of that time, and in the unheard-of torments of her last illness, in which her sufferings were increased to the utmost excess, she had not to repent of having once wished for an easier death.
Both, in short, found war in pro-cinctu both found the people whom they governed, willing to support the privations and sacrifices which war imposes; hungering and thirsting for its glories, its pomps and triumphs; entering even with lively sympathy of pleasure into its hardships and its trials; and thus, from within and from without, prepared for military purposes.
The livery and colour of the carriage were certainly what is denominated quiet; but there was an appearance of state which indicated that the owner had not entirely "renounced the pomps and vanities of this wicked world," and my spleen was excited. "Ay, sweep along," I bitterly muttered, "worthy type indeed of the apostles! I like the pride that apes humility.
Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore then a few sunny smiles and many tears a little love and infinite strife whisperings from paradise and fierce mockeries from the anarchy of chaos dust and ashes and once more darkness circling round, as if from the beginning, and in this way rounding or making an island of our fantastic existence, that is human life; that the inevitable amount of man's laughter and his tears of what he suffers and he does of his motions this way and that way to the right or to the left backwards or forwards of all his seeming realities and all his absolute negations his shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows of whatsoever he thinks, finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in dread hope anticipates; so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for ever and ever.
My poor church, which you think so bare, is decked like a bride; it is filled with fragrance; even the floor is strewn with leaves, in the midst of which they make a path of scattered roses for the passage of the holy sacrament. That's a day on which I do not fear comparison with the pomps of Saint-Peter at Rome; the Holy Father has his gold, and I my flowers, to each his own miracle.
Everybody knows the fatal pollution of the marriage pomps on the reception of Marie Antoinette in Paris; the numbers who perished are still spoken of obscurely as to the amount, and with shuddering awe for the unparalleled horrors standing in the background of the fatal reign horrors 'That hush'd in grim repose, await their evening prey.
The shows and bustle with which his plays abound have the same original. As knowledge advances, pleasure passes from the eye to the ear, but returns, as it declines, from the ear to the eye. Those to whom our authour's labours were exhibited had more skill in pomps or processions than in poetical language, and perhaps wanted some visible and discriminated events, as comments on the dialogue.
Lipsius, for example, protested with fervor, on first seeing this vast establishment of Oxford, that one college of this university was greater in its power and splendor, that it glorified and illustrated the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education, than any entire university of the continent.
Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling often an honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revolts equally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common epitaph. Now, at the soul's christening and initiation into the Life of Reason, the first vow must always be to "renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world."
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