C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Bells

For bells are the voice of the church;
They have tones that touch and search
The hearts of young and old.

Longfellow.

The music nighest bordering upon heaven.

Lamb.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow.

Tennyson.

Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Tennyson.

That all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul—the dinner bell.

Byron.

When o’er the street the morning peal is flung
From yon tall belfry with the brazen tongue,
Its wide vibrations, wafted by the gale,
To each far listener tell a different tale.

Holmes.

And the Sabbath bell,
That over wood and wild and mountain dell
Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy
With sounds most musical, most melancholy.

Samuel Rogers.

Those evening bells! those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells,
Of youth, and home, and that sweet time,
When last I heard their soothing chime!

Tom Moore.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet, now dying all away.

Cowper.

Bell, thou soundest merrily,
When, the bridal party
To the church doth hie!
Bell, thou soundest solemnly,
When, on Sabbath morning,
Fields deserted lie!

Longfellow.

The bells themselves are the best of preachers,
Their brazen lips are learned teachers,
From their pulpits of stone, in the upper air,
Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw,
Shriller than trumpets under the Law,
Now a sermon and now a prayer.

Longfellow.

The cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard,
Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice
Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims
Tidings of good to Zion.

Charles Lamb.

And this be the vocation fit,
For which the founder fashioned it;
High, high above earth’s life, earth’s labor
E’en to the heaven’s blue vault to soar.
To hover as the thunder’s neighbor,
The very firmament explore.
To be a voice as from above
Like yonder stars so bright and clear,
That praise their Maker as they move,
And usher in the circling year.
Tun’d be its metal mouth alone
To things eternal and sublime.
And as the swift wing’d hours speed on
May it record the flight of time!

Schiller.

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten golden notes,
And all in tune
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens while she gloats
On the moon!

Poe.

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