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The rustic who follows the plow through furrowed fields, unkempt, clownish, toil-stained, weary and overworked, may brawl raucous roundelay at even-tide and enjoy the fullness of earthly bliss. His neighbor similarly situated may suffer agonies because his tastes and ambitions are higher. Those who imagine "plow hands" have no ambitions to gratify know little of life.
There was, indeed, little time for reply, for the bugles, after a lively flourish, were now silent, and Peretto, with his two attendant minstrels, stepping beneath the windows of the strangers' apartments, joined in the following roundelay, the deep voices of the rangers and falconers making up a chorus that caused the very battlements to ring again:
Who does not know the charming roundelay: "Drink the glad wine with me, With me spend youth's gay hours; Or a sighing lover be, Or crown thy brow with flowers. When I am merry and mad, Merry and mad be you; When I am sober and sad, Be sad and sober too!" written however by no poet of modern days, but by Praxilla, in the fifth century before Christ.
And I, who minded that bloody war in which my father lost his all, knew what the words meant, and drank deep. But for the screaming of the birds there was silence of death. And, indeed, it was death we had come to disenthrone. M. Radisson issued orders quick on top of one another, and the sailors swarmed from the hold like bees from a hive. The drum beat a roundelay that set our blood hopping.
In Chaucer these passages make his page "as fresh as is the month of May." When he went forth on these April and May mornings, it was not solely with the intent of composing a roundelay or a marguerite; but we may be well assured, he allowed the song of the little birds, the perfume of the flowers, and the fresh verdure of the English landscape, to sink into his very soul.
The roundelay now commenced, in which each one must give the Christian name of his lady-love, and assuredly every second youth caught a name out of the air; some, however, repeated a name with a certain palpitation of the heart.
Finding this to be far beyond my single strength, I procured three assistants, and, at a given signal, we simultaneously launched it forth. At that moment the Young Roscius and another star were fascinating the house, when our gigantic bundle, lodging for a moment between the rollers, gradually squeezed through them, and the next, enveloping our victims, "Turned to groans their roundelay."
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