THE POET OF THE BELLS.
By E.H. Goss.
Longfellow may well be called the Poet of the Bells; for who has so largely voiced their many uses as he, or interpreted the part they have taken in the world's history. That he was a great lover of bells and bell music is evinced by the many times he chose them as themes for his poems; nearly a dozen of which are about them, containing some of the sweetest of his thoughts; and allusions to them, like this from Evangeline,—
Anon from the belfry
Softly the Angelus sounded,"—
are sprinkled all through his longer poems, as well as his prose. The Song of the Bell, beginning,—
"Bell! thou soundest merrily
When the bridal party
To the church doth hie!"
was among his earliest writings; and The Bells of San Blas was his last poem, having been written March 15, 1882, nine days only before he died:—
"What say the Bells of San Blas
To the ships that southward pass
From the harbor of Mazatlan?"
And this last stanza must contain the last words that came from his pen:—
"O Bells of San Blas, in vain
Ye call back the Fast again!
The Past is deaf to your prayer:
Out of the shadows of night
The world rolls into light;
It is daybreak everywhere."
One of his latest sonnets is entitled Chimes.
"Sweet chimes! that in the loneliness of night
Salute the passing hour, and in the dark
And silent chambers of the household mark
The movements of the myriad orbs of light!"
This was sung of the beautiful clock that
"Half-way up the stairs it stands"
in his mansion at Cambridge, by so many thought to be the one referred to in The Old Clock on the Stairs. But no; that one was in the "Gold House" at Pittsfield, and is now in disuse; while this one is a fine piece of mechanism, striking the coming hour on each half hour, and on the hour itself sweet carillons are played for several moments, so familiar to the poet that it is no wonder that to hear it he says,—
"Better than sleep it is to lie awake."
And who has not been entranced by the melody of his
"In the ancient town of Bruges
In the quaint old Flemish city,
As the evening shades descended,
Low and loud and sweetly blended,
Low at times and loud at times,
And changing like a poet's rhymes,
Rang the beautiful wild chimes
From the belfry in the market
Of the ancient town of Bruges."
In the prologue to The Golden Legend, we have the attempt of Lucifer and the Powers of the Air to tear down the cross from the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral, with the remonstrance of the bells interwoven:
| "Laudo Deum verum! | Funera plango! |
| Plebem voco! | Fulgura frango! |
| Congrego clerum! | Sabbata pango! |
| "Defunctus ploro! | Excito lentos! |
| Pestem fugo! | Dissipo ventos! |
| Festa decoro! | Paco cruentos!" |
"I praise the true God, call the people, convene the clergy;
I mourn the dead, dispel the pestilence, and grace festivals;
I mourn at the burial, abate the lightnings, announce the Sabbath;
I arouse the indolent, dissipate the winds, and appease the avengeful."
Another rendering of the two last lines reads:—
"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.'"
