If ever Ghosts act plays, they act
them on this ghostly stage.
It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the
darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting the
main street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by
the bright sky, so wonderfully blue. I passed from all the glory
of the day, into a dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing,
feeble tapers were burning, people were kneeling in all directions
before all manner of shrines, and officiating priests were crooning
the usual chant, in the usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy
tone.
Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this
same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre
of the same torpid, listless system, I came out by another door,
and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the shrillest
trumpet that ever was blown. Immediately, came tearing round the
corner, an equestrian company from Paris: marshalling themselves
under the walls of the church, and flouting, with their horses'
heels, the griffins, lions, tigers, and other monsters in stone and
marble, decorating its exterior.
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