A bell of hollow, deafening tone, swinging heavily in its lofty tower with ceremonial slowness, that seems to have a mathematical rhythm and moves by some perfect mechanism, says in peals punctiliously adjusted to the ritual:
“I am the empty sound that melts away without having made vibrate a single one of the infinite chords of feeling in the heart of man. I bear in my echoes neither sobs nor sighs. I perform correctly my part in the lugubrious, aerial symphony of grief, my sonorous strokes never falling behind nor going in advance by a single second. I am the bell of the parish church, the official bell of funeral honors. My voice proclaims the mourning of etiquette; my voice laments from the heights of the belfry announcing to the neighborhood the fatality, groan by groan; my voice, which sorrows at so much a sob, releases the rich heir and the young widow from other cares than those of the formalities attending the reading of the will, and the orders for elegant mourning.
“At my peal the artisans of death come out of their atrophy: the carpenter hastens to adorn with gold braid the most comfortable of his coffins; the marble worker strikes in his chisel seeking a new allegory for the ostentatious sepulchre; even the horses of the grotesque hearse, theatre of the last triumph of vanity, proudly shake their antique tufts of flywing-colored plumes, while the pillars of the church are wound about with black baize, the traditional catafalque is set up under the dome, and the choir-master rehearses on the violin a new Dies Irae for the last mass of the Requiem.
“I am the grief of tinsel tears, of paper flowers and of distichs in letters of gold.
“To-day it is my duty to commemorate my fellow-countrymen, the illustrious dead for whom I mourn officially, and on doing this with all the pomp and all the noise befitting their social position, my only regret is that I cannot utter one by one their names, titles and decorations; perchance this new formula would be a comfort to their families.”
“When the measured hammering of the heavy bell ceases an instant and its distant echo, blent with the cloud of tones that the wind carries away, is lost, there begins to be heard the sad, uneven, piercing melody of a little clapper-bell.”
“I am,” it says, “the voice that sings the joys and bewails the sorrows of the village which I dominate from my spire; I am the humble bell of the hamlet, that calls down with ardent petitions water from heaven upon the parched fields, the bell that with its pious conjurations puts the storms to flight, the bell that whirls, quivering with emotion, and in wild outcries pleads for succour when fire is devouring the crops.
“I am the friendly voice that bids the poor his last farewell; I am the groan that grief chokes in the throat of the orphan and that mounts on the winged notes of the bell to the throne of the Father of Mercies.
“On hearing my melody, a prayer breaks involuntarily from the lip, and my last echo goes to breathe itself away on the brink of hidden graves—an echo borne by the wind that seems to pray in a low voice as it waves the tall grass that covers them.
“I am the weeping that scalds the cheeks; I am the woe that dries the fount of tears; I am the anguish that presses on the heart with an iron hand; I am the supreme sorrow, the sorrow of the forsaken and forlorn.