heard swinging away over the fading summer landscape.
Delicious ghosts of sound rise up from wooded hollows and sandy creeks, as we recall the legends connected with bells. Come unto the yellow sands, and the wind will blow as Ariel’s song, in soft sad music from a sub-marine belfry. Listen, listen! Those are the old bells of Bosham, carried off, people say, by piratical Danes, and long ago lost under the waves: on a still evening they may be heard chiming in with the new bells. There are similar chimes which fishermen have heard in Cornwall, in Norfolk, and in Normandy; and a sadder peal on the shore near Bangor, whither a sacrilegious, money-loving bishop, who afterwards became blind, went down to see the five fair bells of his cathedral shipped off.
We like that brave old Teutonic bell which refused to toll a requiem for the soul of a wicked emperor, though it rang full inspired tones while a poor man was dying.
The Emperor heard but the sinner’s knell,
For the poor man tolled the emperor’s bell.
The Gothic and Merovingian bells had plenty of mettle and right noble humours. They resented neglect and ill-usage. To keep them quiet, it was necessary to ring or toll them gently every evening, otherwise they might have proved troublesome, and unseasonably disturbed the ears of a town. The great bell of Soissons, indignant at being carried away by Clotaire, began to ring so violently, that the warrior was glad to put it down, and get away as well as he could with his army. These bells were endued with great locomotive powers, for they could walk across the sea, or even fly in the air. Though the great bells were too large to be made pets of, there were certain portable bells which the clergy and laity of Ireland and Scotland held in high veneration: in fact, they swore by them; and we can readily believe that they were more afraid of swearing falsely on them than they were on the Gospels. In Armagh there was a blessed bell of such marvellous and sudorific virtue, that a dying person by merely placing his hand on it has been known, on the evidence of several anonymous persons, to be cured.
St. Columba had a bell called Dia Diogheltus—God’s vengeance—which visited perjurers in some terrible and undescribed manner. As an extreme instance of what bells could do, we need only refer to the Inchcape rock, and the fate of the rover who destroyed the bell placed upon it by the abbot of Aberbrothok.
Winding under oaken shadows along the low grassy meadows of Kent, we hear from the grey minster the pleasant peal that Chaucer’s pilgrims heard, which required twenty-four men to ring. Ringing round the banks of the Cherwell come the notes of the merry Christ Church bells. Along the reedy Cam we can fancy ourselves lean and threadbare students regaling our ears, after a lecture upon Porphyry and the comments of Averroes, with the music of Pope Calixtus’s peal ringing from the belfry of King’s College. Then comes “a most tuneable ring” of bells from Wiltshire and Somersetshire, the old bells of Sherborne which haply Dunstan cast; those of Malmesbury, we fear, have long since disappeared, in spite of the warning epigraph,—
In Heaven’s blest mansion he ne’er sets his feet
Who steals this bell from Aldhelm’s sacred seat.
Wafted far away along the plain the wind brings us the sound of the old bell in Sarum, one of the finest ever cast. And tolling with heavy music for a royal soul we listen by the willowy Thames to the three great bells which King Edward III. hung in Westminster, “whose ringings, it was said, soured all the drink in the town.” Crossing the sea, we hear carillons from the belfry of Bruges, which Longfellow has so aptly caught. Along the Rhine or the Danube still clang a hundred tongues of bells, “now a sermon and now a prayer.”
We know of a venerable old abbey, that of Tewkesbury, whose chimes have condescended to a song of Moore’s—“Believe me, if all those endearing young charms;” and Mr. Thackeray, who was recently at Antwerp, detected the chimes of that stately cathedral profanely indulging in the “Shadow Dance,” from Dinorah.
Sepulchrally sound the bells of Palermo and Paris, summoning thousands of souls to heaven or hell. There are the Exchange bells which rung of themselves in the great fire, and chimed, “There is no luck about the house.” And that fine sympathetic bell of Trim, which they say became cracked on the day the great Duke died, has never uttered a true note since.
Latimer, in one of his sermons, tells even a sadder circumstance. “I heard,” says he, “of a bishop of England that went on a visitation, and as it was the custom, when the bishop should come and be rung into the town, the great bell’s clapper was fallen down and broken, so that the bishop could not be rung into the town. There was a great matter made of this, and the chiefs of the parish were much blamed for it in visitation. The bishop was somewhat quick into them, and signified that he was much offended.
“They made their answers, and excused themselves as well as they could. ‘It was a chance,’ said they, ‘that the clapper broke, and we could not get it mended by-and-by; we must tarry till we can have it done; it shall be mended shortly as may be.’ Among other men one was wiser than the rest, and he comes here to the bishop. ‘Why, my lord,’ saith he, ‘doth your lordship make so great a matter of the bell, which breaketh its clapper! Here is a bell,’ said he, and pointed to the pulpit, ‘that hath lacked a clapper for twenty year. We have a parson that fetcheth out of this benefice fifty pounds a year, but we never see or hear him.’”
Truly there is significance in the sounds of bells, and some significance even in their silence. But never are their notes more universally significant than on a certain day, now near at hand, when, according to the old carol,
All the angels in Heaven shall sing
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day;
And all the bells on earth shall ring
On Christmas Day in the morning!
