Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/47

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kept myself throughout busy and intent. But as I said, the first Sunday I could not find my way in the music, and only know that the choir sang “Hosanna in exelsis” and intoned several hymns while the plaited palms were being given to the Pope and divided by him among the cardinals. They are long staves adorned with fretted points, crosses, and crowns, but all made of dried palm leaves, which make them look as though they were gold. The cardinals who are seated in a square in the inner chapel with their abbés at their feet, advance singly and receive each a palm staff, with which they retire; then come the bishops, monks, abbots, all the remaining ecclesiastics, then the choirmen, the cavaliers of honour and everyone else. They all receive olive branches bound with palm leaves; this makes a long procession, and meanwhile the choir continues to sing. The abbés hold the tall palms of their cardinals, looking like so many sentinels’ lances, and then lay them in front on the ground; just then the pomp of colour in the chapel was beyond what I ever saw in any other ceremonial. There are the cardinals in vestments worked in gold with red caps, before them the violet-robed abbés holding the golden palms, further off the brilliant dresses of the Pope’s attendants, then the Greek priests and the patriarchs in all their splendour, the Capuchins with their white beards and all the other monks; on another side one sees the Swiss guards with their uniforms as gay as the plumage of paroquets; all have olive branches in their hands, and the music goes on perpetually. One scarcely took in what