Nothing can look duller than the future of this second-hand and multiplying world.  Men need not be common merely because they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dullness in their future!  To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth—­that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and that there is no growth for them—­it does not look like a future at all.  More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions.  Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.  He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just built.  But what the newness is to be he cannot tell.  Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age.  Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent people?  “I will do such things:  what they are yet I know not.”

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells.  The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue.  The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence.  You cannot shake together a nightingale’s notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling.  I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer, and the chimes await their appointed time to fly—­wild prisoners—­by twos or threes, or in greater companies.  Fugitives—­one or twelve taking wing—­they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered from the close hands of this actual present.  Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past.

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in “Parsifal.”  They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their own language.  The spirit of place, which is to