英文名著精选阅读:《红字》第二十一章(下)
Chapter 21 THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
第二十一章 新英格兰的节日
But we perhaps exaggeratethe grey or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterised the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritanceof Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epocha time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditarytaste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the observance of majesticceremonies, to combine mirthfulrecreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesqueand brilliant embroideryto the great robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a colourless and manifolddilutedrepetition of what they had beheld in proud old London- we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show- might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth- the statesman, the priest, and the soldier- deemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social eminence. All came forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.
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