And loud in air, calls men to prayer,
From the tapering summits of tall minarets,
Such empty phantom I freely grant them,
But there’s an anthem more dear to me—
It’s the bells of Shandon
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lee.
[p 125]
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” in Gray’s “Elegy,” the best known, and, in its
own line, the best poem in the English language. More dramatic is Southey’s story of the warning bell that the Abbot of Aberbrothock placed on the Inchcape Rock. James Russell Lowell has a beautiful thought in his little poem “Masaccio”—
Out clanged the Ave Mary bells,