Los Angeles daily herald., 1886-11-14
The Variety Of Uses to
Which They Are Put.
PRACTICAL AND PROsAIC VIEWS
Importance of the Part in Life
Played by Hammer and
Clapper.

sends the office-boy to the desk, and that
sends the engines to fire. There are
bells little and bells big; bells that work
with ropes; bells struck by clapper and
bells pounded by hammer; bells swung
and bells jerked; vibrating bells, dumb
bells and diving bells. There are famous
bells, often like famous men, in that they
are more or less cracked; for instance,
the old Independence bell at Philadel-
phia, and the biggest of them all, the
one thing that serves to fix Moscow in a
boys mind. Then there are poetic bells
that is to say bells immortalized by
poets. Edgar Allan Poe knew a large
assortment of that kind. Tom Moore
wasn't acquainted with SO many, but
those he was intimate with were far
sweeter and more lovable. OF course
you remember what he sang about
them
Those evening bells! Those evening bells
How many a tale their music tells,
OF youth and home, and that sweet time
When last heard their soothing chtme
Another poet, Byron, eulogized bell
of far different sort, yet to ordinary
mortals more grateful
That all softening, overpoweriDg knell
The tocsin of the soul-the dinner bell
Some people might allege that Byron
had made a mistake and confounded the
soul with the stomach, but he probably
had in mind the ancients, who ima agined
that the home of the soul was the liver
Certainly he was quite right in using the
adjective ''overpowering, for there is
nothing like the call to dinner for CON
quering all occupations. Did you never
see bricklayer drop his uplifted trowel
when the clock struck II? Did you
never see q farmer drop his scvthe when
the welcome sound came over the fields
from the kitchen door?
Far less grateful is another household
bell, that used for waking. 1t is indeed
strange what different emotion the
sound of a bell excites at A. M, from
that felt at IL NJ. Bells have language,
and it is what they tell that affects men.
For instance, the church bell at quarter.
pas, 10 on Sunday morning talks in q
lively, cheerful tone, telling you to
"Hurry up! Hurry up! Time to start!
Time to start ~" Fifteen minutes later
that same bell, in slow measured tones,
is telling you to "Walk slow! Walk
slow! Solemn day! Solemn day." and So
is putting you in the right frame of mind
to enter the sacred portals. That same
svnt ~ Eco hroalyo o,1 thu a
bell is all excitement, jerking out the
dire news in widest tones.
Bells are very. very old. Aaron, the
priest of the Jews, wore tiny ones on the
hem of his robe, hanging between EN-.
broidered pomegranates; their tinxling
was to tell of the priests approach. King
David used to make music with bells, il
q picture of him so engaged is trust
worthy. Bells used to tell the Romans
when it was time to bathe, and the early
Christians when it was time to pray.
The latter use still remains in the Ro-
man Catholic custom of ringing the
Angelus at morning, noon and night.
In the middle ages bells came to be
used to give alarms telling the people of
danger, whether from fire, flood or some
human enemy. So useful were they
found for this purpose that in the mid.
die ages every city and town came to
have It's bell and its tower, where watch
ers could stay and be ever ready to sound
an alarm. In Italy the bell was
called the campanile, and as much care
was taken to have beautiful campanile
as to have beautiful church, SO now
: the lover of fine architecture finds the
italian campanile one of the M ost inter-
esting subj ects for study. At first church
bells were put In such towers, separate
from the church; the belfry was late
device, Then came the idea of using
belfry bells for signals and alarms,
whence our modern idea of the church
bell fire alarm. Never bell rang out
more terrible signal than given from the
:, steeple of st. Germain.l 'Auxerrois, in
+ Paris. on that awful Sunday morning,
the oath of August, 1872, ST. Bartholo.
news Day. 1t was between l and 2
O'Clock in the morning that the ominous
clang broke through the stiffness of the
night, and Immediately the bells of a
hundred churches made reply. 1t was
the signal for massacre that only ended
when 40, 900 Huguenots had persisted.
Bells were very early known in the
British Isles, unless Shakespeare errs in
making the sound of bell the signal to
Macbeth for his awful crime. You re.
member his words after that soliloquy
in which he wonders if it is q dagger he
sees before him:
Igo and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear 1t not, Duncan, for 1t Is knel!
That summons thee to heaven or to hell,
Whether or no Macbeth ever heard q
bell in bis barbaric Scotland, certain it is
that it England the bell was already in
common use. In London the bell OF st.
Paul's was already hung. and as far back
as Henry the First's time it was used to
call the burgesses to "town-mote," oi
town-meeting. In all the English towns
it came to BIZ used for this purpose, as
we'll as to call people to church at night.
Rang out the curfew bell, telling that il
was time for honest folk to be abed-a
custom handed down even to our own
days and yet lingering in the O'Clock
bell of our mill cities. In Edward the
First's time it was made penal to go Out
of doors at night after the hour of cur
few.
The combination of bells in chimes
was an invention of the early middle ages
that seems to have gone out of favor in
recent times. We, in America, have
very few chimes of any merit, and vel
there is no music that can stir SO many
hearts at once, can as fifty call people te
church, mark the death of the old year
and the birth of the new, and cclebratt
all occasions of religious ceremony. The
power of the chime has been gloriously
immortalized in Tennyson's elm Memor
iam," in those grand stanzas begin
ming:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
From the chime Shakespeare took on,
of his most striking SMILES. He puts i
in wretched Ophelia's mouth after Ham
let has convinced her of his madness b,