A Bell's Biography

Hearken to our neighbor with the iron tongue. While I sit musing over my
sheet of foolscap, he emphatically tells the hour, in tones loud enough
for all the town to hear, though doubtless intended only as a gentle hint
to myself, that I may begin his biography before the evening shall be
further wasted. Unquestionably, a personage in such an elevated
position, and making so great a noise in the world, has a fair claim to
the services of a biographer. He is the representative and most
illustrious member of that innumerable class, whose characteristic
feature is the tongue, and whose sole business, to clamor for the public
good. If any of his noisy brethren, in our tongue-governed democracy, be
envious of the superiority which I have assigned him, they have my free
consent to hang themselves as high as he. And, for his history, let not
the reader apprehend an empty repetition of ding-dong-bell.
He has been the passive hero of wonderful vicissitudes, with which I have
chanced to become acquainted, possibly from his own mouth; while the
careless multitude supposed him to be talking merely of the time of day,
or calling them to dinner or to church, or bidding drowsy people go
bedward, or the dead to their graves. Many a revolution has it been his
fate to go through, and invariably with a prodigious uproar. And whether
or no he have told me his reminiscences, this at least is true, that the
more I study his deep-toned language, the more sense, and sentiment, and
soul, do I discover in it.

This bell--for we may as well drop our quaint personification--is of
antique French manufacture, and the symbol of the cross betokens that it
was meant to be suspended in the belfry of a Romish place of worship.
The old people hereabout have a tradition, that a considerable part of
the metal was supplied by a brass cannon, captured in one of the
victories of Louis the Fourteenth over the Spaniards, and that a Bourbon
princess threw her golden crucifix into the molten mass. It is said,
likewise, that a bishop baptized and blessed the bell, and prayed that a
heavenly influence might mingle with its tones. When all due ceremonies
had been performed, the Grand Monarque bestowed the gift--than which none
could resound his beneficence more loudly--on the Jesuits, who were then
converting the American Indians to the spiritual dominion of the Pope.
So the bell,--our self-same bell, whose familiar voice we may hear at all
hours, in the streets,--this very bell sent forth its first-born accents
from the tower of a log-built chapel, westward of Lake Champlain, and
near the mighty stream of the St. Lawrence. It was called Our Lady's
Chapel of the Forest. The peal went forth as if to redeem and consecrate
the heathen wilderness. The wolf growled