Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things.
[It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title. Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend."
Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new to me.">[
FOOTNOTES:
[O heaven, 'twas frightful! now run down and stared at
By shapes more ugly than can be remembered—
Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing,
But only being afraid—stifled with Fear!
And every goodly, each familiar form
Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me!
(From my MS. tragedy [S. T. C.]) Remorse, iv. 69-74—but the passage is omitted from Osorio, act iv. 53 sq. P. W., pp. 386-499].