A DISSERTATION ON BELLS

Evening Star, Issue 20056, 22 December 1928, Page 2

A DISSERTATION ON BELLS

[Written by 0. R. All&x, for the ‘ Evening Star.’]

All life is exile from an unguessod home, Worlds half remembered where perhaps we trod; For memories haunt ns of a calm, grand peace, When we were flowing in the veins of God. There is a rhythm in'the windy trees, A gleam in the apple bloom, A measured music in the hidden brook, That seems a counterpart of something gone. Whole lives forgotten live in a bell’s tope, A sudden landscape or a sister’s look.

The above stanza is taken from a Nowdigate prize poem. The Newdigate is the Oxford equivalent for the Chancellor’s medal, which Tennyson, it will ho remembered, won during his sojourn at Cambridge. The subject on which he was called to write was Tircbuctoo. Something a shade less arid prompted the foregoing verse. It is taken from a poem about Camoens, the Portuguese bard, and I quote it because of that sapient line concerning a bell’s tone. The writer once spent a period of recuperation in this town, but ht probably had the chimes of a Somersetshire ' town in mind when he wrote that Wordsworthian stanza. It is for the native of Dunedin to write of its bells, or at least for_ ouo for whom the first dawning of'Consciousness was accompanied by their ringing. It will be maintained that there is little to rhapsodise about in the bells of Dunedin. This is not a rhapsody, but a consideration. Nor is it an inventory. It is a reverie induced by tho sound of four individual bells which 1 propose to pass in review. S cannot write with certainty concerning tho casting of Knox Church boll. This much is certain, however. The spirit of John Knox dwells in its reverberations. Whatever later-day liberalism may have brought about, there is an uncompromising Calvinism in its tone, a harking back to the first beginnings of this Edinburgh of tho South. It is interesting to reflect that R. L. Stevenson may have hoard Knox bell during Ids brief sojourn in Dunedin. Did it set him thinking of the peewcets about tho martyrs’ graves in his native hills, or is that a fancy induced by overmuch reading of Stevensonia ?

There is a hell in Howe street which is, oddly enough, bound up with at least one child’s preconceived notions of Switzerland. This, not because ii surmounts a stronghold of Protestantism, but because of some inherent suggestion of herds and uplands. I have never sought a seconder for this notion. If this article finds its way into print it may possibly evoke such a one. There is a hell attached to a church in Cumberland street which tho Northern Recreation Ground serves as unofficial close. It is quite impossible to imagine the effect of that monitory tinkle upon a stranger, so inextricably is it woven into the texture of a life lived within the radius of its effluence. To tho immigrant whose childhood may have been spent within call of some deep-throated Devonshire chime it may sound like the peevish falsetto. of a parvenu. But to the small native, of Groat King street it is all the saints and prophets calling him across “ The Valley.” These are hells that, for many of us, have had no beginning. They are one with the sound of the rain on the roof or the birds in the trees. Of recent years another note has boon added to tho symphony. All hut a few would he at a loss to name precisely tho day on which they first heard the present hell of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Not a few can remember the beautiful child v* whose memory it was placed there. TH is a bell which is almost free from « secondary sting which waits on ni‘ < ; t chimes. It is horn upon the air without pain, as Keats wished to cease upon the midnight. It calls to mind _whnt Wordsworth wrote of tho music of humanity:

Not harsh nor grating, hut with ample power To chasten and subdue, it is not to be maintained that Dunedin is a city of bells, in respect either of quantity or quality. An English town of half its size is more richly endowed. It is improbable that such a leisurely art as change-ringing will ever be practised in a country whore electrification is the order of the day. It is possible to tear from the bosom of some English village its secret of sound, and reproduce it from the disc in any climate. What is impossible of reproduction is the personality of the place. There is an elusive quality in places, as in people, of which wo can he made aware only through personal contact. To the native of Basingstoke or Kidderminster a reproduction of the hells of Dunedin by gramophone would afford a very meagre and unsuggestive symphony, lie would turn with avidity to the carrillon of Bruges, or the tocsin of Moscow. Only for tho native is tho sound of a city’s hells compounded of old fears, old hopes, old jokes, old friendships, old perplexities, old rancours. Whole lives lie hidden in a hell’s tone.