be seen in the shapes of the fields and the manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the breath of the earth, overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells.  It speaks its local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you know how familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of the people.  The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be.  Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.

Spirit of place!  It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.  It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.  The untravelled spirit of place—­not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without variation—­lurks in the by-ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity.  It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness.  It is sweet and nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them.  Long white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be made.  Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such a visit?  And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child.  He is well used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies.

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay measures, when we 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.