nderneath this immense metallic canopy is a chapel, in which is a
shrine at which many thousands of the Russians every year offer up
their devotions. The entrance to this is through an iron gateway, and
the visitor descends several stone steps before he stands upon the
paved floor of the chapel. Looking upward and around him, he then for
the first time realizes the vast magnitude of this wonderful casting.
It is almost impossible to conceive that such a prodigious body of
metal was ever at one time a molten mass, seething over vast furnaces.
Imagine a circular room more than twenty feet in diameter, and of
proportionate height, and you have some faint idea of the interior of
the Tzar Kolokol. It is said that it required ten strong men to draw
the clapper from the centre to the inner rim, by means of ropes, so as
to produce the ordinary sounds of which the bell was capable. This I
can very well credit; for the great bell of the Ivan Tower, not a
third of the size of this, has an iron tongue which requires the
strength of three men to strike against the rim. The tremendous depth
and volume of the tones sent forth for many leagues around by the
monarch bell must have been sublime beyond conception, judging by this
single fact, that while in Moscow, the largest bell I heard sounded
was far inferior in size and weight to that of the Ivan Tower, which
is rung only on state occasions, yet the sounds were so deep and
powerful that they produced a reverberation in the air resembling the
distant roar of thunder, mingled with the wailing of the winds in a
storm. When all the bells of the tower, save the largest, were tolled
together, the effect was absolutely sublime, surpassing in the
grandeur and majesty of their harmony any thing I had ever heard
produced through human agency. Judge, then, what must have been the
effect when the Tzar Kolokol rolled forth a jubilee or a death-knell
from his iron tongue!

I do not wonder that the Russians regard this bell with such peculiar
feelings of reverence. There is something to arouse the most profound
and reverential emotions of our nature in the simple, grand, and
mysterious melody of all great bells--something of the infinite that
exalts our thoughts and aspirations from the earth. In my
recollections of travel I have few purer or more endearing pleasures
than the impressions produced by sounds like these. Often the grand
old strains of the bells of Lima, Mexico, and Spain seem still to