THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets
have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much
interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible
utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is
a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake
together a nightingale\'s notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can
you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas
wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling.
I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole
peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made
light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance
in his boots by a merry highwayman.