Part 5 (1/2)
The same is also alluded to in a satirical poem, 1594, ent.i.tled, _Batt upon Batt_:--
Shew me a man can turn up Noddy still, And deal himself three fives, too, when he will; Conclude with one and thirty, and a pair, Never fail ten in Hock, and yet play fair; If Batt be not that night, I lose my aim.
Bells and their Messages.
By Edward Bradbury.
Do not imagine that this is an essay on campanology, on change-ringing, grandsires, and triple bob-majors. Do not fancy that it will deal with carillons, the couvre-feu, or curfew bell, with the solemn Pa.s.sing bell, the bell of the public crier, the jingling sleigh bell, the distant sheep bell, the noisy railway bell, the electric call bell, the frantic fire bell, the mellow, merry marriage peal, the sobbing m.u.f.fled peal, the devout Angelus, or the silvery convent chimes that ring for prime and tierce, s.e.xt, nones, vespers, and compline. Do not conclude that it will describe bell-founding; and deal with the process of casting, with technical references to cope, and crook, and moulding, drawing the crucible, or tuning.
It is of bells and their a.s.sociations and inscriptions that we would write, the bells that are linked with our lives, and record the history of towns, communities, and nations; announcing feasts and fasts and funerals, interpreting with metal tongue rejoicings and sorrowings, jubilees and reverses; paeans for victories by sea and land; knells for the death of kings and the leaders of men. As we write, the bells of our collegiate church are announcing with joyous clang the arrival of Her Majesty's Judge of a.s.size. Before many days have pa.s.sed another bell in the same town will tell with solemn toll of the short shrift given by him to a pinioned culprit, the only mourner in his own funeral procession.
Bells are sentient things. They are alike full of humour and pathos, of laughter and tears, of mirth and sadness, of gaiety and grief. One may pardon Toby Veck, in Charles d.i.c.kens' goblin story, for investing the bells in the church near his station with a strange and solemn character, and peopling the tower with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the bells, of all aspects, shapes, characters, and occupations. ”They were so mysterious, often heard and never seen, so high up, so far off, so full of such a deep, strong melody, that he regarded them with a species of awe; and sometimes, when he looked up at the dark, arched windows in the tower, he half expected to be beckoned to by something which was not a bell, and yet was what he had heard so often sounding in the chimes.” The bells! The word carries sound and suggestion with it. It fills the air with waves of cadence. ”Those Evening Bells” of Thomas Moore's song swing out undying echoes from Ashbourne Church steeple; Alfred Tennyson's bells ”ring out the false, ring in the true” across the old year's snow, and his Christmas bells answer each other from hill to hill. There are the tragic bells that Sir Henry Irving hears as the haunted Mathias; ”Les Cloches de Corneville”
that agitate the morbid mind of the miser Gaspard; and the wild bells that Edgar Allen Poe has set ringing in Runic rhyme.
”Bell,” says the old German song, ”thou soundest merrily when the bridal party to the church doth hie; thou soundest solemnly when, on Sabbath morn, the fields deserted lie; thou soundest merrily at evening, when bed-time draweth nigh; thou soundest mournfully, telling of the bitter parting that hath gone by! Say, how canst thou mourn or rejoice, that art but metal dull? And yet all our sorrowings and all our rejoicings thou art made to express!” In the words of the motto affixed to many old bells, they ”rejoice with the joyful, and grieve with the sorrowful”; or, in the original Latin,
Gaudemus gaudentibus, Dolemus dolentibus.
An old monkish couplet makes the bell thus describe its uses--
Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum: Defuncto ploro, pestum fugo, festa decoro.
”I praise the true G.o.d, call the people, convene the clergy; I mourn for the dead, drive away pestilence, and grace festivals.” Who that possesses--to quote from Cowper--a soul ”in sympathy with sweet sounds,”
can listen unmoved to
----the music of the village bells Falling at intervals upon the ear, In cadence sweet--now dying all away, Now pealing loud again, and louder still, Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on.
The same poet makes Alexander Selkirk lament on his solitary isle--
The sound of the church going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Ne'er sigh'd at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.
Longfellow has several tender references to church bells. He sets the Bells of Lynn to ring a requiem of the dying day. He mounts the lofty tower of ”the belfry old and brown” in the market place of Bruges--
Not a sound rose from the city at that early morning hour, But I heard a heart of iron beating in the ancient tower.
From their nests beneath the rafters sang the swallows wild and high; And the world, beneath me sleeping, seemed more distant than the sky.
Then most musical and solemn, bringing back the olden times, With their strange unearthly changes rang the melancholy chimes.
Like the psalms from some old cloister, when the nuns sing in the choir; And the great bell tolled among them, like the chanting of a friar.
Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain; They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again.
Who does not remember Father Prout's lyric on ”The Bells of Shandon”? We venture to quote the four delicious verses _in extenso_--
With deep affection and recollection I often think of the Shandon bells, Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells-- On this I ponder where'er I wander, And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee; With thy bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant waters of the River Lee.
I have heard bells chiming, full many a chime in Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine; While at a glib rate bra.s.s tongues would vibrate, But all their music spoke naught to thine; For memory dwelling on each proud swelling Of thy belfry knelling its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon Sound far more grand on The pleasant waters of the River Lee.
I have heard bells tolling ”old Adrian's mole” in Their thunder rolling from the Vatican, With cymbals glorious, swinging uproarious In the gorgeous turrets of Notre Dame; But thy sounds were sweeter than the dome of Peter Flings o'er the Tiber, pealing solemnly.