The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

its name.  It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week,
and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.  The
untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but
always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by-
ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity.
It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness.  It is sweet and
nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them.  Long
white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and
unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be
made.  Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such a
visit?  And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the
spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the
conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is
there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child.  He is well
used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a
condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud
in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies.
If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay
measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile march
with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies.
If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curious
local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights.  Their way is
for the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not
hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the
sub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strength
that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a little
art, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means.  If
it were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for
those melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the
bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and what
effect of liberty.
These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the
world.  Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.  The
belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the time
when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt.  But, needless to say,
this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy.  At that time they must
have had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, and
golden throats, precisely tuned.  The hounds of Theseus had not a more