His inferior nature rose halfway to meet his companions as they stooped . Other faces wore the similitude of man or woman , but distorted or extravagant , with red noses pendulous before their mouths , which seemed of awful depth and stretched from ear to ear in an eternal fit of laughter . Here might be seen the salvage man -- well known in heraldry -- hairy as a baboon and girdled with green leaves . By his side -- a nobler figure , but still a counterfeit -- appeared an Indian hunter with feathery crest and wampum-belt . Many of this strange company wore foolscaps and had little bells appended to their garments , tinkling with a silvery sound responsive to the inaudible music of their gleesome spirits . Some youths and maidens were of soberer garb , yet well maintained their places in the irregular throng by the expression of wild revelry upon their features . Such were the colonists of Merry Mount as they stood in the broad smile of sunset round their venerated Maypole . Had a wanderer bewildered in the melancholy forest heard their mirth and stolen a half-affrighted glance , he might have fancied them the crew of Comus , some already transformed to brutes , some midway between man and beast , and the others rioting in the flow of tipsy jollity that foreran the change ; but a band of Puritans who watched the scene , invisible themselves , compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls with whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness . Within the ring of monsters appeared the two airiest forms that had ever trodden on any more solid footing than a purple-and-golden cloud . One was a youth in glistening apparel with a scarf of the rainbow pattern crosswise on his breast . His right hand held a gilded staff -- the ensign of high dignity among the revellers -- and his left grasped the slender fingers of a fair maiden not less gayly decorated than himself . Bright roses glowed in contrast with the dark and glossy curls of each , and were scattered round their feet or had sprung up spontaneously there . Behind this lightsome couple , so close to the Maypole that its boughs shaded his jovial face , stood the figure of an English priest , canonically dressed , yet decked with flowers , in heathen fashion , and wearing a chaplet of the native vine leaves . By the riot of his rolling eye and the pagan decorations of his holy garb , he seemed the wildest monster there , and the very Comus of the crew . `` Votaries of the Maypole , '' cried the flower-decked priest , `` merrily all day long have the woods echoed to your mirth . But be this your merriest hour , my hearts ! Lo ! here stand the Lord and Lady of the May , whom I , a clerk of Oxford and high priest of Merry Mount , am presently to join in holy matrimony . -- Up with your nimble spirits , ye morrice-dancers , green men and glee-maidens , bears and wolves and horned gentlemen ! Come !
a chorus now rich with the old mirth XXXXX Merry England and the wilder glee of this fresh forest , and then a dance , to show the youthful pair what life is made of and how airily they should go through it !
Behind among as before between by in of than with