re ringing it
is the singing of the city. Descanting upon this congenial theme,
the poet-novelist observes, in continuation, that while at first the
vibrations of each bell rise straight, pure, and in a manner separate
from that of the others, swelling by degrees, they blend, melt, and
amalgamate in magnificent concert until they become at length one mass
of sonorous vibrations, which, issuing incessantly from innumerable
steeples, float, undulate, bound, whirl over the city, expanding at last
far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of their oscillations. What
has been said thus superbly, though it may be somewhat extravagantly, by
Hugo, in regard to "that _tutti_ of steeples, that column of sound, that
cloud or sea of harmony," as he variously terms it, has been said less
extravagantly, but quite as exquisitely, by Charles Dickens, in regard
to the chimes of a single belfry. After this New Year's tale of his was
first told, there rang out from the opposite shores of the Atlantic,
that most wonderful tintinnabulation in all literature, "The Bells" of
Edgar Poe--which is, among minor poems, in regard to the belfry, what
Southey's "Lodore" is to the cataract, full, sonorous, and exhaustive.
And there it is, in that marvellous little poem of "The Bells," that the
American lyrist, as it has always seemed to us, has caught much of the
eltrich force and beauty and poetic significance of "The Chimes" as
they were originally rung forth in the prose-poetry of the English
novelist:--

"And the people--ah, the people--
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On [or from] the human heart a stone--
They are neither man nor woman--
They are neither brute nor human--
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the hells."

Charles Dickens, in his beautiful imaginings in regard to the Spirits
of the Bells--something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's
pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume
in the form in which it was first of all published--has exhausted the
vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight
beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's Eve by the awe-stricken
ticket-porter.

In the Reading one would naturally have liked to have caught so