whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile march
with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies.
If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curious
local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights. Their way is
for the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not
hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the
sub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strength
that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a little
art, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means. If
it were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for
those melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the
bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and what
effect of liberty.

These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the
world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively. The
belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the time
when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But, needless to say,
this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy. At that time they must
have had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, and
golden throats, precisely tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a more
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 thos