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Pageant   /pˈædʒənt/   Listen
Pageant

noun
1.
An elaborate representation of scenes from history etc; usually involves a parade with rich costumes.  Synonym: pageantry.
2.
A rich and spectacular ceremony.  Synonym: pageantry.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Pageant" Quotes from Famous Books



... array of knights and nobles, who came either to see or to share in the approaching trial. The splendid banners, the heraldic pomp and barbaric grandeur of their retinues, augmenting with every fresh arrival, made the streets one ever-moving pageant for many days before the conflict began. Isabella had full leisure to observe, from her own lattice, the gay and costly garniture, and the glittering appointments of the warriors, with the pageants and puerile diversions suited to the taste and capacity ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... of the pageant and display of a military life visible to Richard as he re-entered the great gateway, before which a sentry in white flannel jacket and forage cap was marching to and fro with a bayonet in his hand, ready to give a glance at the lad and then ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn

... witnessed that great event in France in 1840, that fifty-seven years later I should witness a similar pageant in the American Republic, when our nation paid its last tributes to General Grant. There are many points of similarity in these great events. As men they were alike aggressive and self-reliant. In Napoleon's will he expressed the wish that his last resting place might be in the land and among the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... L1000, or L1500.' I asked him if he meant it for the stage. 'No, no; the stage is a sorry job, that course will not do for these hard days; besides, there is too much machinery in the piece for the stage.' I observed that I was not sure of that, for pageant and machinery was the order of the day, and had Shakespeare been of this date he might have been left to die a deer-stealer. 'Well, then, with all my heart, if they can get the beast to lead or to drive, they may bring it on the stage if they like. It is a sort ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... for a payer of wheels and the hedd of an old pageant, 2s. 8d. 1504." "Payd. For the charges of brenning Mrs. Arden, and the execution of George Bradshaw, 43s."—Chamberlain's ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... boy grew up, the memory of this long pageant survived; there fell upon him the desire to see some of the places; such a desire, if it is not gratified, dies away into a feeble spark—but it can always be blown again into a flame. This year the chance came to the boy, now a graybeard, to see these places; and ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... Angustifolia', there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the 'Viola Pedata'; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood maligned as the 'Rhus Venenata'. The very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... them mingle all those maidens holding picture-decorated fans with which they flirt—this is the derivation of our modern word—and the gay gallants with their never-ending compliments and smiles. And so the pageant sweeps along with music, joy, and laughter, to the undiscovered land, hidden in mist, and entered ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... Marcel and Valentin, the great septet of the duel scene, beginning, "De dritti miei ho l'alma accesa," with the tremendous double chorus which follows as the two bands rush upon the scene. As if for relief from the storm of this scene, the act closes with brilliant pageant music as De Nevers approaches to ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... remembered about poppies is not to rely greatly upon their durability and make the mistake of expecting them to fill too conspicuous a place, or keep long in the marching line of the garden pageant. They have a disappointing way, especially the great, long-stemmed double varieties, of suddenly turning to impossible party-coloured mush after a bit of damp weather that is most discouraging. Treated as mere garden episodes and massed here and there where ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... fleet, which is lying to anchor in three lines of four miles or so each in length, with a respectful margin of clear water all about, is, viewed merely as a marine pageant, magnificent; as a display of potential fighting power, most convincing. No man might look on it and his sensibilities—admiration, patriotism, respect, whatever they might be—remain unstirred. To witness it is to pass in mental review the great fleets of other days and inevitably to draw conclusions. ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly

... clearing and his brilliant smile shining forth. "In sooth, I have no desire to quit it just yet. I would fain be one of those to welcome back the great Duke, who will be here ere the year closes; and you should not miss seeing the pageant which will greet the victor of Blenheim. It may even be that the Duke himself will find employment ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green

... form a blank in my memory. Standing under Mrs. Ransome's picture (I would stand there), I received the congratulations of the hundred or more people who were anxious to see Mr. Allison's bride, and of the whole glittering pageant I remember only the whispered words of Mrs. Vandyke as she ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... postwar sense; and their devices of economy in household outlay, dress and entertainment are a revelation in the science of ways and means. There are parents, children, relatives and friends all passing before us in the pageant of life from the cradle to the grave. No circumstance, from an introduction to a wedding, is overlooked in this panorama and the spectator has beside him a cicerone in the person of the author who clears every ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... and again of the glories so near at hand—the glories that had for years been the goal of his ambition. He pictured the pageant to come—the glitter of armor and liveries, the splendor and sparkle of jewels and lights, and all the dazzling gorgeousness of royal equipments—the throngs of courtiers and beautiful women bowing before him, proud of the privilege of doing him homage—him, a mere boy—yet the king—the ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous

... gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like an insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... me, With my very heart as palsied As a wasted cripple's knee! Suppliant-like for alms depending On a false and foreign court, Jostled by the flouting nobles, Half their pity, half their sport. Forced to hold a place in pageant, Like a royal prize of war, Walking with dejected features Close behind his victor's car, Styled an equal—deemed a servant— Fed with hopes of future gain— Worse by far is fancied freedom Than the captive's ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... and in their churches; for, when it was considered that the same great Creator of the universe was worshipped alike by Protestant and Catholic, what difficulty could the mind have in divesting their pageant of its tinsel, its trappings, and its censers, and joining with sincerity in offering the purest incense, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... Smith and Brown found the camp stretching before them, scarcely so picturesque as they had anticipated, but with enough of the military air about its green sod and conical tents, to make it rather varied and pleasing to a couple of "cits" who had not looked upon the extended army pageant around Washington, or seen anything more of war than could be observed in a turn-out of the First Division on the Fourth of July. On a broad level, stretching back for a quarter of a mile from the railroad-track, and terminating in a strip of noble oak woods, the tents of the encampment ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... a great pride in the trappings of their state elephants, which is exhibited whenever any pageant demands an extraordinary display. I have seen cloths of silk so closely embroidered with heavy gold as to be of enormous value, and so great a weight that two men could barely lift them. Such cloths ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... wonderful green is piqued with little flowers, such as may be seen in our climate. Hundreds of little birds sing to us distractedly of the joy of life; the sun shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous corn is already in the ear; it might be some gay pageant of our days of May. One forgets that it is February, that we are still in the winter—the luminous winter ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... came one small and beautifully modelled gondola, rowed by four men in red and black, while on the white silk cushions in the stern sat the Prince and Princess. There was no splash of oar or rattle of rowlock; swiftly, silently, with an air of stately power and pride, the lovely pageant came, passed, and disappeared under the shining evening sky and the gathering shadows of "the dim, rich city." I never saw, or expect to see, anything of its kind ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... 'To Philosophy.' The torch of 'Truth' was on the altar of 'Reason,' spreading light, &c. The National Convention, and all the authorities, attended at this burlesque and insulting ceremony. In February, 1794, a grand fete was ordered by the convention, in which hymns to Liberty were chanted, and a pageant in honor of the abolition of slavery in the colonies, was displayed in the 'Temple of Reason.' In June another festival was ordered—to the Supreme Being: the God of Philosophy. But the most superb exhibition ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... early in the morning of June 21, last summer, to witness the pageant of her Majesty Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, I secured a good place on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Trafalgar Square. There were two rows of people ahead of me, but I did not mind that. Those directly ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... universe? What was this grand, eternal pageant to which he had yearned from his childhood up, and in which he could never take part? Every morning the same magnificent sun; every morning the same rainbow in the waterfall; every evening the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... my betrothed lies in prison, ill, perhaps, or fretting his brave heart away, am I to be dragged forth to make part of a pageant for the entertainment of his jailers? I would sooner have the lowest cell in the dungeon—aye! and starve and stifle for lack of food and air, than be forced to deck myself out in borrowed bravery, and sit mowing and smiling in a gay pavilion, and clap hands ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock

... Hans Holbein's 'Dance of Death,' that grim, phantasmal pageant, symbolic as a dream of Pharaoh; and perhaps you bear in mind that design called 'The Elector,' in which the Prince, emerging from his palace gate, with a cloud of courtiers behind, is met by a poor woman, her little child by the hand, appealing to his ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... be merry, remember, better the world with a song, Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong. Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span. Laugh, and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... a gay pageant! what bright dresses! It looks like a flower besprinkled meadow. What is ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... Not being long-sighted, the whole pageant was a blank to me after that cruel deprivation, for I could no longer see that imperial ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... them. Just a fleet passing of wings, a clamour of cries—why should one's heart leap, and his nerves go restless, and joy and sadness get mixed up inside him? A few birds flying over—yet stirring as a military pageant! A jangle of senseless "honks"—yet in it the irresistible urge of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... not a drop of blood was shed, in defence of this pageant raised by the ambition of Dudley. Deserted by his partisans, his soldiers and himself, the guilty wretch sought, as a last feeble resource, to make a merit of being the first man to throw up his cap in the market-place of Cambridge, and cry "God save queen Mary!" But on the following ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... with "The Fall of Lucifer," and ending with "Doomsday." In 1834, the Abbotsford Club published some others from the Digby MS., in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In 1825, Mr. Sharp, of Coventry, published a dissertation on the Mysteries once performed there, and printed the Pageant of the Sheremen and Taylor's Company; and in 1836 the Abbotsford Club printed the Pageant played by the Weavers of that city. In 1836, the Surtees Society published the series known as The Towneley Mysteries, consisting ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... for a short period on the crest of the Revolutionary wave. Men are mad with the joy over the new thought of universal brotherhood. Little do Danton and the other Utopians realize that the Pageant of Brotherhood is but the prelude of ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... Standing on my seat, I saw an immense lane of people, silent as a wood; a contagious shiver stirred them, like a gust of wind amongst the leaves; I saw the distant glitter of helmets and cuirasses, and the pageant swept along with that one tired, kindly, homely face for its centre of attraction, luring loyalty even from a heart so republican as mine by its air of patient weariness. I thought, and I believed the thought sincere, that I would not have exchanged places with her who was the mistress of ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... every grass-blade, every pebble of her land was dearer to her than life; and that her life was nothing to her father. He who alone in all the world could have stood between her and the shameful pageant of invasion, who could have taught her to face it, to front it nobly, who could have bidden her hope and pray and wait—he sat in his turret turning little wheels while the whole land shook with the throes of invasion—their ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... the man whom the Fronde had so persecuted was about to place his family upon the steps of the throne. The solemn reception which the King and Queen gave Mazarin at the Louvre on the 3rd February, 1653, was not therefore an idle pageant or empty ceremony. That same day, Mazarin could understand that a new era had arisen for him, more brilliant and more secure than that of 1643, after the defeat of the Importants, and that that sterile and sanguinary ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... really don't know what to do, but young Charlotte has given every single presentable garment that Jimmy possessed to different unclothed children in the Settlement, who were needed in the pageant, and Mark and Billy are laughing at her, while Jimmy is howling. I just ran in to see Harriet a minute and ask her ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... sloth—produce ten thousand tyrants, 70 Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing. The false and fond examples of thy lusts Corrupt no less than they oppress, and sap In the same moment all thy pageant power And those who should sustain it; so that whether A foreign foe invade, or civil broil Distract within, both will alike prove fatal: The first thy subjects have no heart to conquer; 80 The last they rather ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes before it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the Renaissance in painting should be complete, it is necessary to add a fifth power to these four—that of the Venetian masters, who are the poets of carnal beauty, the rhetoricians of mundane pomp, the impassioned interpreters of all things great and splendid in the pageant of the outer world. As Venice herself, by type of constitution and historical development, remained sequestered from the rest of Italy, so her painters demand separate treatment.[235] It is enough, therefore, for the present to remember that without ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... pompous procession being arrived in Fenchurch street, the queen stopped at a beautiful pageant, crowded with children in mercantile habits, who congratulated her majesty upon the joyful occasion of her ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... hexameters of the Aeneid. He caught but a fragment of meaning here and there, but the sumptuous imagery, the stirring names, the glimpses into a past where Roman senators were mingled with the gods of a gold-pillared Olympus, filled his mind with a misty pageant of immortals. These moments of high emotion were interspersed with hours of plodding over the Latin grammar and the textbooks of philosophy and logic. Books were unknown ground to Cantapresto, and among masters and pupils there was not one who could help Odo to the meaning of his task, or who ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... consists in the unreal contempt for what is not really contemptible. With his high notions of office, I should have been surprised if he had foregone the levee; and assuredly he has not reckoned without reason; for a more splendid or flattering pageant could not be witnessed than that which his rooms exhibited. Unquestionably the most remarkable man in the empire at this moment, it is his fortune to attract the honourable regards of all who are distinguished as compeers. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various

... visit to the strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more conspicuous wonders—the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk of mouldering chapels—and it was only when his first hunger was appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... shrinking process began to extend beyond Joe now. A fortnight before, she had been much gratified by allusions to the future and felt herself an important individual enough. Then, she must have shared her stepmother's pity at the poverty of the pageant which had just passed by. But now the world had changed. Matrimony with Joe Noy was not a subject which brought present delight to her, but the little bride who had just gone to her wedding filled Joan's thoughts. What was in that girl's heart, she greatly wondered. Did Milly Penn feel ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... place in the home or at the church, the bridal pageant has only one object in view,—it is wholly for the sake of the bridegroom. Every woman desires to come to her husband in all the glory of her womanhood and of her social position. By all custom the bridegroom ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway

... standing in the archway of the Packhorse Inn, among the maids and stable-boys gathered to see the pageant pass on its way to hear the Assize sermon. And standing there, I was witness of a little incident that seemed to escape ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... it was such a substantial reality, appeared to Mr. Verdant Green's bewildered mind to resemble somewhat the pageant of a dream. There was the usual spasmodic gaiety of conversation that is inherent to bridal banquets, and toasts were proclaimed and honoured, and speeches were made - indeed, he himself made one, of which he could not recall a word. Sufficient let ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... association complicated by the ever-recurring introduction of new initial impulses, both peripheral and central. These are the dreams in which we are conscious of being perfectly passive, either as spectators of a strange pageant, or as borne away by some apparently extraneous force through a series of the most diverse experiences. The flux of images in these dreams is very much the same as that in certain waking conditions, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... latter case each play might remain all day at a particular station and be continuously repeated as the crowd moved slowly by; but more often it was the, spectators who remained, and the plays, mounted on movable stages, the 'pageant'-wagons, were drawn in turn by the guild-apprentices from one station to another. When the audience was stationary, the common people stood in the square on all sides of the stage, while persons of higher rank or greater means were seated on temporary wooden scaffolds or looked down ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... September 8, 1831, was hardly more than an interlude in the great struggle, yet it served for the moment to assuage the animosities of party warfare. The king himself, who disliked solemn ceremonials, and the ministers, deeply pledged to economy, were inclined to dispense with the pageant altogether. It was found, however, that not only peers and court officials but the public would be grievously disappointed by the omission of what, after all, is a solemn public celebration of the compact between ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... Perhaps 'twas brought by some one in distress. And left in pledge for loan my mother lent. Here by a ribbon hangs a little key! I have a mind to open it and see! Heavens! only look! what have we here! In all my days ne'er saw I such a sight! Jewels! which any noble dame might wear, For some high pageant richly dight! This chain—how would it look on me! These splendid gems, whose may they be? (She puts them on ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... As to poor Wolfert, instead of returning in triumph, laden with bags of gold, he was borne home on a shutter, followed by a rabble route of curious urchins. His wife and daughter saw the dismal pageant from a distance, and alarmed the neighborhood with their cries: they thought the poor man had suddenly settled the great debt of nature in one of his wayward moods. Finding him, however, still living, they ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... that an obstinate scruple on the part of the printers and the limits of a duodecimo page did not forbid my reproducing here, in all their glory, the unique head-lines which precede the article in question. Any pageant introduced by music is impressive, says Madame de Stael. At least she says something of that sort, only it is in French, and I can not remember it exactly. And so any newspaper article is startling when introduced by the braying ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... for grotesque pageant in the open air must have gradually died out before the general advance of refinement. The Mask by a process of evolution would have become the Opera. But it often happens that when a taste or fashion is at the point of death, it undergoes a forced and temporary ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... though the Dholpur chief is peculiarly the creature of the British Government, and indebted to it for all he has or ever will have, and though he has never had anything, and never can have, or can hope to have, anything from the poor pageant of the house of Timur, who now sits upon the throne of Delhi;[12] yet, on his seal of office he declares himself to be the slave and creature of that imperial 'warrior for the faith of Islam'. As he abstains from ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare to the East,—at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... and mishap gained hourly upon me; and all the bright aspirations of a soldier's glory, all my enthusiasm for the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, fell coldly upon my heart, and I looked upon the chivalry of a soldier's life as the empty pageant ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... east,—the rosy flush,—the Dawn,— For that bright gem in morning's coronal, That one lone star that gleams above the glow; For that high glory of the impartial sun,— The golden noonings big with promised life; The matchless pageant of the evening skies. The wide-flung gates,—the gleams of Paradise,— Supremest visions of Thine artistry; The sweet, soft gloaming, and the friendly stars; The vesper stillness, and the creeping shades; The moon's pale majesty; the pulsing dome, Wherein we feel ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham

... volumes of smoke rolling over a smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white. One's mind is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness, with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself, bursting quite close, killing people ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... narratives of what he saw with his own eyes, or gathered from the lips of men who had themselves been part of what they told. This fact, along with his mastery of a style which is always vivacious if sometimes diffuse, accounts for the vividness and picturesqueness of his work. The pageant of medieval life in court and camp dazzled and delighted him, and it is as a pageant that we see the Middle Ages ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... let me stand back silently, The pageant passes by, And live my life with these new Christs Whom you would crucify, And laugh with mirth to see the mob ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin

... spend the parting hour; For he had charged that his array Should southward march by break of day. Well loved that splendid monarch aye The banquet and the song, By day the tourney, and by night The merry dance, traced fast and light, The maskers quaint, the pageant bright, The revel loud and long. This feast outshone his banquets past: It was his blithest—and his last. The dazzling lamps, from gallery gay, Cast on the Court a dancing ray; Here to the harp did minstrels sing; There ladies touched a softer string; With long-eared cap and motley vest The ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... O Love! O Gateway of Delight! Thou porch of peace, thou pageant of the prime Of all God's creatures! I am here to climb Thine upward steps, and daily and by night To gaze beyond them and to search aright The far-off splendor of thy track sublime." ERIC MACKAY'S Love-letters of ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... door just under the marble slab with its solemn appeal to reverence, "Rispettati la Casa di Dio"—penetrated into the Frari to see where the more pleasure could be gotten, as also to claim their right to be there; for this pageant was for the people also, which they did not forget, and their good-humored ripple of comment was tolerant, even when most critical. But outside one could have all of the festa that was worth seeing, with the sunshine added,—the glorious sunshine of this November ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... performing the larger half of clerical duty and getting but a tittle of the tithes,—of the weary seamstress, wetting with midnight tears the costly stuff which must be ready to adorn heartless rank and fashion at to-morrow's pageant,—of the pale governess, grudgingly paid her pittance of salary without a kind word to sweeten the bitterness of a lonely lot. He is the friend even of the workhouse juveniles, and, as their champion, castigates with cutting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... connection with it, as became so genuine a cockney of the imperial period. He was full of the high patriotic thoughts which so solemn a celebration had kindled within him. "O great Rome!" he said, "thou art first, and there is no second. In that wonderful pageant which these eyes saw last year was embodied her majesty, was promised her eternity. We die, she lives. I say, let a man die. It's well for him to take hemlock, or open a vein, after having seen the Secular Games. What was there to live ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... It was clear indeed from the first that, loyal as Scotland might be, its loyalty would be of little service to the Queen if she attacked the new religion. At her entry into Edinburgh the children of the pageant presented her with a Bible and "made some speech concerning the putting away of the Mass, and thereafter sang a psalm." It was only with difficulty that Murray won for her the right of celebrating Mass at her court. But for the religious difficulty ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... higher and higher, filling the languid air, and drowning the trill of the mockingbirds. Patricia, filling her apron with midsummer flowers, sang with a careless passion, her mind far away in the midst of a Whitehall pageant, described to her the night before by that ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... on the porch together and watched the sunset. A flaming pageant of color traced and retraced its ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase

... atoms of the air Around me palpitate and burn, All heaven dissolves in gold, and earth Quivers with new-found joy. Floating on waves of harmony I hear A stir of kisses, and a sweep of wings; Mine eyelids close—"What pageant nears?" "'Tis Love that ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... exquisite that all who saw it would dance and sing for gladness. They also believed in a Wonderful Stranger who was coming into their slow, steady lives. They fell to dreaming of the surprising pageant they would blazon forth upon the world a little later. And while they dreamed, the wind of night passed moaning through their leafless branches, and Time flew noiselessly above ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... and then through other openings, or vistas, at far-distant points, the flashing of polished arms. But sometimes, as the wind slackened 25 or died away, all those openings, of whatever form, in the cloudy pall, would slowly close, and for a time the whole pageant was shut up from view; although the growing din, the clamors, the shrieks, and groans ascending from infuriated myriads, reported, in a language not 30 to be misunderstood, what was going on behind ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... which was given to the Earl of Arundel to carry before her. The mayor himself bore the mace. By express permission of the Court of Aldermen a number of Florentine and other merchant strangers were allowed to attend on horseback, and to erect a pageant at Leadenhall.(1370) The whole length of the streets through which the queen had to pass on her way to the Tower had been lavishly decorated, and was lined with members of the various civic companies in their livery gowns. Nothing was omitted that ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... his retrospect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different station; from the station of that stern revolution which, within his own time, and partly under his own eyes, had shattered the whole imperial system of thrones, in whose equipage this gay pageant made so principal a figure, had humbled Caesar himself to the dust, and left him an emperor without an empire? We at least, for our parts, could not read without some emotion one little incident of these gorgeous scenes recorded by ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... CALI. No regal pageant, deck'd with casual honours, Scorn'd by his subjects, trampled by his foes; No feeble tyrant of a petty state, Courts thee to shake on a dependant throne; Born to command, as thou to charm mankind, The sultan from ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... it was between the soft gray of the opposite stone houses, with the green-sprinkled street beneath and the glorious blue above, it was as wonderful as if, looking down into clear deeps of water, one should see the passing of some pageant of an enchanted city buried deep in the crystalline waves centuries ago. There was nothing here but the procession, leisurely occupying the whole street, treading out faint odors without raising a particle of dust. The crowd that in other places always obscures and spoils such a display here followed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... nodding understandingly and whispering: "I see, I see." . . . Of course, I did nothing of the kind. Neither of us did anything; we stood side by side looking down at the girl. For quite a time she did not stir, staring straight before her as if watching the vision of some pageant passing through the garden in the deep, rich glow of light ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... fitted to maintain peace: his resentments, though hasty and violent, were not dreaded, while he was found to drop them with such facility; his friendships were little valued, because they were neither derived from choice, nor maintained with constancy. A proper pageant of state in a regular monarchy, where his ministers could have conducted all affairs in his name and by his authority; but too feeble in those disorderly times to sway a sceptre, whose weight depended entirely on the firmness and dexterity of the ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... much, and sound thus much, there is one little jogging traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey, and this is the perception of a child. Surely our own memories might serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed the principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to furnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not our mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... one of the numerous spaces which extend along the coast of the Propontis, was chosen for the site of the magnificent ceremony. Here was placed an elevated and august throne, calculated for the use of the Emperor alone. On this occasion, by suffering no other seats within view of the pageant, the Greeks endeavoured to secure a point of ceremony peculiarly dear to their vanity, namely, that none of that presence, save the Emperor himself, should be seated. Around the throne of Alexius Comnenus were placed in order, but standing, the various dignitaries of his splendid court, in their ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... drunk with balm, while that strange ship, a golden galley now, with glittering draperies festooned with flowers, paced to the measured beat of oars along the calm, and Cleopatra smiled alluringly from the great pageant's heart. ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... surprise the English mediaeval smith or carpenter, cobbler or bowyer, when he turns playgoer at Whitsuntide, assisting at a play which expressed himself as well as its scriptural folk, we must go on to later episodes. The Deluge in the Chester pageant, that opens the present volume, has among its many Noah's Ark sensations, some of them difficult enough to mimic on the pageant-wagon, a typical recall of the shipwright and ark-builder. God ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... world-renowned history that this charming picture of Gavarni's conjures up before us—an historical pageant that sweeps by us in wondrous fantastic forms of light and shadow, when we scan the life of Queen Hortense with searching gaze, and meditate upon her destiny. She had known all the grandeur and splendor of earth, and had seen them all crumble ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... was new-born with the nation; Springing from ashes of desolation, She helped to forge posterity. Now she looks from her chosen station, At pageant, starvation, begg'ry, ovation, Results of her ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... cobwebs of the coachhouse and furbished up, and had drove, with his mother, to the village church to take formal possession of the family pew; but there was such hooting and laughing after them as they passed through the village, and such giggling and bantering about the church door, that the pageant ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... that we had viewed The union of our earth and skies Renewed: nor less alive renewed Than when old bards, in nature wise, Conceived pure beauty given to eyes, And with undyingness imbued. Pageant of man's poetic brain, His grand procession of the song, It was; the Muses and their train; Their God to lead the glittering throng: At whiles a beat of forest gong; At whiles a glimpse of Python slain. Mostly divinest harmony, The lyre, the dance. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... narrative is concerned; the connection with them which it has hitherto maintained closes with the end of the first siege of Rome. We can claim the reader's attention for historical events no more—the march of our little pageant, arrayed for his pleasure, is over. If, however, he has felt, and still retains, some interest in Antonina, he will not refuse to follow us, and look on ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... begin with the leaders in social conformity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should sweep through the great middle classes that may escape its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might present the pageant, the social history, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... with brilliant shops, and thronged with laughing, bare-headed people in outing costumes was a picturesque and fascinating sight. Thousands annually made long journeys and paid exorbitant prices to take part in that pageant. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... have done. She had got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood. She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden time in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... blossom-faced men, who shuffled with him to the churchyard, and who were preceded by another blossom-faced man, affecting a stately stalk, as if he were a Policeman of the D(eath) Division, and ceremoniously pretending not to know his intimate acquaintances, as he led the pageant. Yet, the spectacle of only one little mourner hobbling after, caused many people to turn their heads with a ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... valet-de-chambre." Fashionable wealth and power depend upon exclusiveness to accomplish their usual attendant influences. Royalty hides every hour in secrecy from public gaze, except when it occasionally becomes necessary to treat the subjects to a mere pageant or show of military costume and outside appearances. When Lola Montes displayed to {12} the world the mere humanity of the old king of Bavaria, where had he any prestige left? Schamyl has attained ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... witnesses saw our deceased citizen, Oliver Proudfute, till a late period accompanying the entry of the morrice dancers, of whom he was one, as far as the house of Simon Glover, in Curfew Street, where they again played their pageant. It is also manifested that at this place he separated from the rest of the band, after some discourse with Simon Glover, and made an appointment to meet with the others of his company at the sign of the Griffin, there to conclude ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... took place in the spring of 1468; nor was it long before the ceremonial had been prescribed and the pageant had been made ready for the betrothal of the youthful Caterina; for the Senate could be as prompt in action as far-seeing in judgment when haste seemed wise; and other rulers were looking with no disfavor ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... of illusion troubled the little man. The glamour of the night was gone and with it all that had lent semblance of plausibility to his incredible career; daylight forced all back into confused and distorted perspective, like the pageant of some fantastic and disordered dream uncertainly recalled long ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... purple and fine linen, and still prefer a cot-bed and a bare room, although they may be worth millions. But they are married to scheming, or ambitious, or disappointed women, whose life is a prolonged pageant, and they are dragged hither and thither in it, are bled of their golden blood, and forced into a position they do not covet and which they despise. Then there are the inheritors of wealth. How many of them inherit the valiant genius and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various

... animals—had felt at once that the name aptly embodied the tragedies and the romantic memories of his all-but-vanished race. They had felt, too, that the two old braves who had been brought East to adorn a city pageant, and who had stood gazing stoically for hours at the great bull buffalo through the barrier of the steel-wire fence, were fitted, before all others, to give him a name. Between him and them there was surely a tragic bond, as they stood there islanded among the swelling tides ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... pow'r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator's praise To all the Bless'd above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... make it, the little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... cavalry. The cavalcade was magnificent—treasure had been heaped on treasure—present upon present; twenty women of my own country, and numerous slaves had been permitted to attend upon me, and the procession wore the appearance of a pageant. I ascended my litter with an aching heart; and, journeying by easy stages, arrived at the land of my nativity. The borders were passed, and Abdallah requested me to write an acknowledgment that he had done his duty, which the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat

... irregular column—"It is here! It is here!" they answered with a universal labbayaki, signifying, "Thou hast called us— here we are, here we are!" Then breaking into a rabble, they rushed multitudinously forward. To give the reader an idea of the pageant advancing to possess itself of the Valley, it will be well to refresh his memory with a few details. He should remember, in the first place, that it was not merely the caravan which left El Katif over on the western shore of the Green Sea, but two great caravans merged ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... services past and to come!" and there were promises of still further rewards, a complete pardon for all defalcations, a place within the charmed circle of the Comedie Francaise, a grand pageant and apotheosis with Citizeness Candeille impersonating the Goddess of Reason, in the midst of a grand national fete, and the acclamations of excited Paris: and all in exchange for the enactment of a part—simple and easy—outlined ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent, coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of Holies. Alexander, Caesar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be shown as a painter has shown one ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... showed here and there behind blurred windows; odd doors were opened that a peasant family might stare in questioning wonder—and perhaps in some concern—at the sodden pageant that was passing. But in the streets themselves the troopers met no living thing, all the world having scurried to shelter from ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... the authorities on the spot to proclaim King William and Queen Mary. Never, since the Mayflower groped her way into Plymouth harbor, had a message from the parent-country been received in New England with such joy. Never had such a pageant as, three days after, expressed the prevailing happiness been seen in Massachusetts. From far and near the people flocked into Boston; the Government, attended by the principal gentlemen of the capital and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... of 1853-4 straight from the lake of Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; and had lately been present at an historic pageant—whether or no celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not—in which representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was thus of the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James



Words linked to "Pageant" :   ceremony, pageantry, observance, representation, ceremonial, ceremonial occasion



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