"Men's death I tell, by doleful knell;
Lightnings and thunder I break asunder;
On Sabbath all to church I call;
The sleepy head, I raise from bed;
The winds so fierce I do disperse;
Men's cruel rage, I do assuage."
And in the Legend itself, an historical account of mediæval
bell-ringing is given by Friar Cuthbert, as he preaches to a crowd from
a pulpit in the open air, in front of the cathedral:--
"But hark! the bells are beginning to chime;...
For the bells themselves are the best of preachers;
Their brazen lips are learned teachers,
From their pulpits of stone, in the upper air,
Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw,
Shriller than trumpets under the Law,
Now a sermon and now a prayer."...
In the Tales of the Wayside Inn occurs the pretty legend of The Bell of
Atri, "famous for all time"; and from his summer home in Nahant, from
across the waters he listens to
"O curfew of the setting sun! O bells of Lynn!
O requiem of the dying day! O bells of Lynn!"
In the Curfew he quaintly and beautifully reminds us of the old
_couvre-feu_ bell of the days of William the Conqueror, a custom
still kept up in many of the towns and hamlets of England, and some of
our own towns and cities; and until recently the nine-o'clock bell
greeted the ears of Bostonians, year in and year out. And who does not
remember the sweet carol of Christmas Bells?
"I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
* * * * *
"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men!'"
Indeed, many are the sweet and musical strains that he has sung about
the bells, and he often wished that "somebody would bring together all
the best things that have been written upon them, both in prose and
verse."
Southey calls bells "the poetry of the steeples"; and the poets of all
ages have had more or less to say upon this subject. Quaint old George
Herbert told us to
"Think when the bells do chime
'Tis Angel's music!"
It was a curious theory of Frater Johannes Drabicius, that the principal
employment of the blessed in heaven will be the continual ringing of
bells; and he occupied four hundred and twenty-five pages of a work
printed at Mentz, in 1618, to prove the same.
Truly has it been said: "From youth to age the sound of the bell is sent
forth through crowded streets, or floats with sweetest melody above the
quiet fields. It gives a tongue to time, which would otherwise pass over
our heads as silently as the clouds, and lends a warning to its
perpetual flight. It is the voice of rejoicing at festivals, at
christenings, at marriages, and of mourning at the departure of the
soul. From every church-tower it summons the faithful of distant valleys
to the house of God; and when life is ended they sleep within the bell's
deep sound. Its tone, therefore, comes to be fraught with memorial
associations, and we know what a throng of mental images of the past can
be aroused by the music of a peal of bells.
'O, what a preacher is the time-worn tower,
Reading great sermons with its iron tongues.'"
* * * * *
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