--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of
another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.

Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of lif