BELLS—BELLS-BELLS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20710, 7 May 1929, Page 4

BELLS—BELLS-BELLS.

If, among the noises that have at last roused the question of how much longer the brains and nerves of a cuffering generation can stand the, ever-inereasini* tumult which belongs to the city world the voice of the bell was decided to be an unnecessary noise, what a lot we should miss! It is unnecessary, when one comes to think of it so is the song of the lark, and the silver pipe of the robin—yet, would we, if we could, silence any* of these sounds? Bells ring us from childhood to age, and are fraught with all the memories and suggestions of each stage in life that no mere noise brings. Probably we got our first introduction to the French language when we learned, from our school books, of the “ curfew ” (or “couvre-feu”) bell that rang in the i eign of William the Conqueror to command the putting out of fires at sunset, for fear of fire through the night in the wooden houses of the people. Again, we got, perchance, one of bur most impressive lessons on the rewards rT Z l }}™* we read “ The Inchcape Bell, and trembled to follow “ Sir Raljfii the Rover” to his merited doom. Hear the sledges with their bells, silver bells,” sings Edgar Allan Poe, and. like a skilful player on ‘the glasses.” touching each bell til] it laughs, or tolls at his command, in that swelling, onomatopoeic refrain of “ Bells—Bells— Bells.” Dickens, so evidently a lover of bells, has only once, I think, an unkind word of them, when he speaks of “ church hells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp or fiat, or cracked/ that rang over the streets on a certain gloomy Sunday, making the brick and mortar echoes hideous.” But the spirits of the bells in ; The Carol ” are touched with loving hand, ° Tennyson, again, in his “Vale” and salute to a passing and a new year— Si n 5 “ ut, l vlltl bolls •• • ring out the feud kfnd 11 * 1 pOOr ’ rng n redres3 to all man—shows what a bell can sav, when a poet rings it. ' ’ If look at that picture by which billet is best known to the general public - L Angelus ”• wc sec a painting struck into being, so to say, by, the sound of a bell, and the bowed heads and still faces of the two humble peasants, artestea in their toil by that sound, show that no ■ mere noise . has given them pause. . . . Sometimes a bell achieves the individuality of a person almost, when it receives a name. Down by the side of a grey firth, in a little church, not so long ago laid low, hung a bell that pealed for many a year over the place of “ Highland Mary’s ” rest. ' Tam o Lang ” got his name from an odd manner of giving his stroke, but, to ™ an y once listened to his voice, Tam would, because of the associations connected with it, seem a sweet singer. Marriage hells, mourning knells—when a nation rejoices, when a nation weeps —the hell is a “ vox populi,” saying for us things too deep in our hearts for our own lips to voice. , , . Old years pass to their chiming, and new years enter, with all their hopes and latent possibilities, to the stroke of a boll. r’iUl SoL th< l ?f Ise - rins 1n the tmo •• • King nappy belts across the snow we Collld not afford to “scrap” the .bells, and, even if we did, I think the spirits f the bells would still keep their message sounding in the sentiment, the poetry, and the idealism without which the world’s voices would be “ gev timmer.”—Rita Richmond, in an' exchange.