We have given up announcing the miracle of transubstantiation
or putting to flight storms and demons or managing exorcism
by bell, book and candle, but bells as sweet as the Angelus
still ring over our English fields and woodlands on Sunday.
The passing-bell in a country churchyard is full of pathos and
memory, breaking the stillness and arresting for a moment the
busy hay-makers as they pause to listen, and remember some old
comrade who will no more be seen in their ranks. The solemn
bell at our midnight services, now so customary on the last
evening in each year throughout the land, is also charged with
hallowed thoughts; indeed, I know few things more thrilling
than that watch-night bell, which seems as the crowd kneels
within to beat away on its waves of sound the hopes and fears,
and tumultuous passions of the dead year when its echoes have
ceased those kneeling crowds feel that one more chapter in the
book of life has been written, that ringing voice has sealed the
troubled past and heralded in with its iron, inexorable, tho
trembling lips the unknown future. What with the dinner-bell,
safety yard bell, school, factory and jail bells, small cupola
spring-bells, safety electric bells, not to forget baby’s coral
and bells, bell-rattles, last reminiscence of the extinct fool’s
cap and bells, and fool’s wand, with its crown of jingling
baubles, we seem never to hear the last of bells. Bells are
the landmarks of history as well as the daily ministers to our
religious and secular life. The bell’s tongue is impartial and
passionless as fate. It tolls for the king’s death “_Le roi
est mort_.” It rings in his successor, “_Vive le roi_.”
The cynical bells rang out as Henry VIII led wife after wife to
the altar, the loyal bells rang out for the birth of Charles I,
and the disloyal ones tolled again for his execution. The bells
of Chester rang a peal for Trafalgar, alternated with a deep
toll for the death of Nelson, and some of us can remember the
tolling of St. Paul’s bell as the Iron Duke’s funeral passed
up Ludgate Hill. The long green bell which announced to the
Pisans that the wretched Ugolino, starved to death in the bottom
dungeon, had at length ceased to breathe, still hangs in the
famous leaning tower of Pisa.
At the ringing of the Sicilian Vespers in the Easter of 1282,
8,000 French were massacred in cold blood by John of Procida.
The midnight bells of Paris gave the sign for the massacre of
St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1471, when 100,000 persons are
said to have perished. The great towers of Christendom have all
their eloquent bell tongues, and as we pass in imagination from
one to the other we not only catch the mingled refrain of life
and death as it floats upward from the fleeting generations of
men, but we may literally from those lofty summits contemplate
all the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them.--H. R.
HAWEIS, _English Illustrated Magazine_.
(207)
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