Church bells are an essential part of Baltimore’s sensory landscape. Some ring every day; some only on Sundays. The bells at Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church downtown have been ringing since at least 1812, when they warned Baltimoreans of British invaders during the War of 1812.

Alice Emma Sauerwein Lord (1848-1930) wrote a poem about the church bells of Baltimore, which was published in her book A Symphony in Dreamland in 1899. One imagines her penning these lines as the carillons wafted in through an open window at her house on St. Paul St. just north of Penn Station, on a quiet summer Sunday morning.

Sabbath Bells (1899)
Alice Sauerwein Lord

Hark! I hear the murmuring of bells–
    Distant bells that pulse the city’s heart!
Silvery throb from hill to hill that tells, 
    What their wordless messages impart!
        Murmuring Bells!

List! The many voices rise and fall 
    With a resonance that fills all space,
Many-toned, yet blending, each with all, 
    Till sonorous echoes reach this place. 
        Chiming Bells!

Wherefore should my heart respond so fast 
    To this far-off music of the bells?
Is it that they whisper of the past?
    Can it be hope’s voice that still foretells? 
        O ye Bells!

You can still hear the church bells chiming across Baltimore on Sunday mornings, from the Baltimore Cathedral and the New Refuge Deliverance Church (formerly Christ Episcopal) in Mt. Vernon, to Little Italy’s St. Leo’s, to St. Brown Memorial Episcopal and Corpus Christi in Bolton Hill. And the bells at Old St. Paul’s are still ringing, more than 200 years after the British were repulsed from American shores.

One wonders which of the bells inspired Lord’s poem, and whether one still hears them today.