The worshippers came and went, and while the monk
preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a
taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two
other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as
their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against
time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected
splendor. 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.
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