United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She showed him the chapel, impressive in its ancient Norman simplicity and in its ruin, and the great smoke-begrimed banqueting-hall, where wassails had been held, and beauty had thought her lord a beast. "Well," she demanded, as they paused at length on the threshold of the picture-gallery, "what do you think of my father's castle?"
The office butler accordingly was very lucrative, because the guests at such wassails were in the habit of bribing him to purchase the liberty of drinking as little as they pleased or dared. This Persian habit of compelling excess in drinking was ignored at Ahasuerus's banquet; every guest did as he chose. The royal bounty did not show itself in food and drink alone.
The English people have always been lovers of dancing; and it forms an accompaniment of almost all their old sports and pastimes. Witness the maypoles, wassails, and wakes of rural life, and the grotesque morris-dance, originating in a kind of Pyrrhic or military dance, and described by Sir William Temple as composed of "ten men, who danced a maid marian and a tabor and pipe."
Fa-la! "Whilst youthful sports are lasting, to feasting turn our fasting: With revels and with wassails make grief and care our vassals, Fa-la!"
The æsir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garô-demâna, was more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns. What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light.
Word Of The Day