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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Spirit of Place, by Alice Meynell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Spirit of Place Author: Alice Meynell Release Date: March 15, 2005 [eBook #1309] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPIRIT OF PLACE*** Transcribed from the 1899 John Lane edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk The Spirit of Place and Other Essays 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 THE SPIRIT OF PLACE With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature. To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake together 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 and hustling. I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again 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--by twos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives--one or twelve 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 are away, hours of the past. Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathe
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