Transcribed from the 1899 John Lane edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
The Spirit of Place
Mrs. Dingley
Solitude
The Lady of the Lyrics
July
Wells
The Foot
Have Patience, Little Saint
The Ladies of the Idyll
A Derivation
A Counterchange
Rain
Letters of Marceline Valmore
The Hours of Sleep
The Horizon
Habits and Consciousness
Shadows
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poetshave all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has foundtoo much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with herinaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. Thebell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shaketogether 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 andhustling. I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyousnote in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, withtheir harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford hadagain been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.
The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer,and the chimes await their appointed time to fly—wild prisoners—bytwos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives—one ortwelve taking wing—they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone;they are delivered from the close hands of this actual present. Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the sky; they areaway, hours of the past.
Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory mostsurely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of Francewhen one has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten thanthe bells in “Parsifal.” They mingle with the soundof feet in unknown streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower;they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place, whichis to be seen in the shapes of the fields and the manner of the crops,to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the breath of the earth,overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith,calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks its localtongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and greatlyby these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you know howfamiliar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of the people. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be. Theirutterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise itssubtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seenonce, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits,its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having beenperceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body ofremembrance. The untravelled spirit of place—not to be pursued,for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, withoutvariation—lurks in the by-ways and rules over the towers, indestructible,an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient andeager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within its immemorialboundaries, but it never crosses them. Long white roads outsidehave mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give promise not ofits coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and unforeseengoal 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 i