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Four women neophytes rose from among the worshippers, and shouldering a litter on which rested a square box containing an upright figure of the Holy Virgin followed with bent heads. The Virgin's gown was of yellow satin, covered with costly Spanish lace; strands of Baja Californian pearls bedecked the front of her gown.
She, too, like the Virgin's grandmother, is a widow lady, and wears collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously. There is a largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a second or third-rate man.
But the crowds rushing on the grotto, the sick dying of divine love before the Virgin's statue, the multitudes delirious with the contagion of the miraculous nothing of all that gave an idea of the blast of madness which suddenly inflamed the pilgrims at the feet of the Pope.
Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master's work in fresco be better studied than here. The satisfaction with which he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testified by his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the Virgin's chamber.
But most of the noëls nouvè, they are called in Provençal are purely imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life and of the birth and childhood of her Son.
And whence, above all things, had come those golden roses poised on the Virgin's feet, that piously imagined florescence of woman's flesh from what romance of chivalry, from what story told after catechism by the Abbe Ader, from what unconscious dream indulged in under the shady foliage of Bartres, whilst ever and ever repeating that haunting Angelic Salutation?
In this picture, nothing can exceed the gorgeous splendor of the Virgin's throne and apparel: she wears a jewelled crown; the Child a coronal of pearls; while the background is composed entirely of the mystical roses twined in a sort of treillage.
Now it was that the yellow sunbeams began to dart through the windows; called, as it were, by the priest, the sun itself had come to mass, throwing golden sheets of light upon the left-hand wall, the confessional, the Virgin's altar, and the big clock.
It is an evergreen species, of comparative hardihood, and flowers well in sheltered situations. C. FLAMMULA. Virgin's Bower. France, 1596. This old and well-known plant is quite hardy in this country. The leaves are pinnate, and the flowers white and fragrant. C. Flammula rubro-marginata is a worthy and beautiful-leaved variety. C. FLORIDA. Japan, 1776.
I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning, day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and purity and freshness. The youth of Nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. I doubt if any man can be called "old" so long as he is an early riser and an early walker.
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