The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

just scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash.
But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the
order of the game of a charming melody.  Of all cheerful sounds made by
man this is by far the most light-hearted.  You do not hear it from the
great churches.  Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the
bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does not
ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, and
dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly fills the country.
The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble
bells.  Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can therefore
hear its own tune from beginning to end.  There are no other bells in
earshot.  Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set open to the cloud,
on a festa morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but the
nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune is
uninterrupted.  Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequestered
art of composing melodies for bells--charming division of an art, having
its own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding by
law--dwells in these solitary places.  No tunes in a town would get this
hearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such a
wide and lofty silence.
Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; the
custom is Ligurian.  Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist
complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear
an honest rout of them betimes.  But the nervous tourist has not,
perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal to
him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by
one, the belfries stand and play their tunes.  Variable are those lonely
melodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air
is played for the burial of a villager.
As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that
seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when
the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to
earth's untethered sounds.  This is Milton's curfew, that sways across
one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered."

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1}  All we have to call
her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times
than life, as hope saved."  MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight
times in a line for the pleasure of writing it.  "MD sometimes means
Stella alone," says one of many editors.  "The letters were written
nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not
require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they
were penned."  Not so.  "MD" never stands for Stella alone.  And the