We soon learned their origin.
Reaching a small door, I turned aside, and came where the great bell
was hung, which twenty men were engaged in ringing.
It was a
_fete_ day. I crept inside the frame, and stood actually under
the colossal mass, as it swung like a world in its spheric chime. A
new sense was developed, such as I had heard of the deaf possessing. I
seemed existing in a new medium. I _felt_ the sound in my lungs,
in my bones, on all my nerves to the minutest fibre, and yet it did
not stupefy nor stun me with a harsh clangor. It was _deep_,
DEEP. It was an abyss, gorgeously illuminated of velvet softness, in
which I floated. The sound was fluid like water about me. I closed my
eyes. Where was I? Had some prodigious monster swallowed me, and, like
another Jonah, had I "gone down beneath the bottoms of the mountains"?
I escaped from that perilous womb of sound, and ascended still higher.
There was the mystery of that nocturnal minstrelsy. Seventy-three
bells in chromatic diapason - with their tinkling, ringing, tolling,
knolling peal! Was not that a chime? a chime of chimes? And all these
goblin hammers, like hands and feet of sprites, rising and falling, by
magic, by hidden mechanism.
Of all German cactus blossoms this is the most ethereal. What head
conceived those harmonies, so ghostlike? Every ten minutes, if you lie
wakeful, they wind you up in a net of silver wirework, and swing you
in the clouds; and the next time they swing you higher, and the next
higher, and when the round hour is full the giant bell strikes at the
gate of heaven to bring you home!
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