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 those soft-voiced flocks, but the nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune is uninterrupted.  Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequestered art of composing melodies for bells—­charming division of an art, having its own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding by law—­dwells in these solitary places.  No tunes in a town would get this hearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such a wide and lofty silence.

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; the custom is Ligurian.  Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear an honest rout of them betimes.  But the nervous tourist has not, perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal to him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by one, the belfries stand and play their tunes.  Variable are those lonely melodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air is played for the burial of a villager.

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to earth’s untethered sounds.  This is Milton’s curfew, that sways across one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry—­“the wide-watered.”

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to call her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved “better a thousand times than life, as hope saved.”  MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing it.  “MD sometimes means Stella alone,” says one of many editors.  “The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley,” says another, “but it does not require to be said that it was really for Stella’s sake alone that they were penned.”  Not so.  “MD” never stands for Stella alone.  And the editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the “she” and “her” of every letter.  And this shall be a paper of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.