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Even the mighty rhetoric of Sir Thomas Brown, or Jeremy Taylor, to whom only it has been granted to open the trumpet-stop on that great organ of passion, oftentimes leaves behind it the sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful apparitions starting out of darkness upon the morbid eye, only to be reclaimed by darkness in the instant of their birth, or which belongs to pageantries in the clouds.
What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre, insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the times of Venice in full flower.
We too may be terrified by the frowns, or won by the smiles, of those whose favour is riches and honour, and whose displeasure is poverty and neglect. We too may overlook the honours of the human soul, from an admiration of the pageantries that accompany fortune.
He accordingly provided the apparel, and when clothed therewith, I made bold to go out in the broad daylight, and even ventured to mingle with the multitude in the garden of the palace, who went daily there in the afternoon to see the nobles and ladies of the court walking with their pageantries, while the Duke's musicants solaced them with melodious airs and the delights of sonorous harmony.
The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in his solemn polysyllables.
I found myself within a strange city, where all things might have served to blot from recollection the sweet dreams I had dreamed so long in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. The pomps and pageantries of a stately court, and the mad clangor of arms, and the radiant loveliness of women, bewildered and intoxicated my brain.
Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions.
Rightly viewed, the closing scenes in the life of this estimable woman are not less solemn, not less impressive, than those of that memorable day, when, with all the awful ceremonials of offended justice and the stern pageantries of war, her lover died in the full glare of noonday before the eyes of assembled thousands. He had played for a mighty stake, and he had lost.
The listening for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful airs as might be stirring the peculiar solemnity of the hours succeeding to sunset the glory of the dying day the gorgeousness which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian islands from which my father was returning the knowledge that he returned only to die the almighty pomp in which this great idea of Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries that seemed even more solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality, all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams.
The happiness of many families depended on him. His affairs were vast and complicated, and they kept him longer away from her. All the day, while he was amidst his bales of merchandise, she roamed along the banks of a sequestered stream, weaving bright fancy pageantries, or devising airy gayeties with which to charm his troubled spirit. A bright and sunny being, she comprehended nothing of care.
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