The High-Altar Was Canopied And Curtained In Crimson, Fringed
With Gold, And Against This The Candle-Flames Floated Like Yellow
Flowers.
Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed
from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and
elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar,
where their intoning, like so many
"Silver snarling trumpets 'gan to glide,"
and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing
together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.
How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of
the drama which is so large an element in the worship of the South could
not he conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I
had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to
recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert
of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder
Christian worship seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear
fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but
leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more
likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may
be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than
you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic
in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at
least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or
meridional skies.
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