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The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst.
I am entering on a path, beaten and worn, but straight; I shall cross the weary downs, but each step will bring me nearer the village spire. I am not wandering through life, I am marching on, I stir with my feet the dust in which my father has planted his.
From this form to the true spire the change is slight, and consists in little more than various decoration; generally in putting small pinnacles at the angles, and piercing the central pyramid with traceried windows; sometimes, as at Fribourg and Burgos, throwing it into tracery altogether: but to do this is invariably the sign of a vicious style, as it takes away from the spire its character of a true roof, and turns it nearly into an ornamental excrescence.
They passed over several villages, the inhabitants gazing up at them in open-mouthed wonder, and finally came in sight of a big church spire that they knew belonged in Plankville. Then Dick slowed down the engine, and soon they floated down in an open field close to the main street and not a great distance from the sheriff's office and the jail.
Even as he wondered the enemy's main-mast seemed to become alive. It swayed; it shook; it almost danced; the taut shrouds sagged. At first the boy thought that horror had turned his brain, and he was going mad. He stopped dead and gazed. Yes, it was coming down, coming towards him, towering, tremendous, like a falling spire.
They hack it shamefully, and I look at it and say, "Well, the old poplar is ruined now, surely!" But a season passes, and I look again, to see that the tremendous vigor of the tree has triumphed over the butchers; its sores have been concealed, new limbs have pushed out, and it has again, in its unusual height, assumed a dignity not a whit inferior to that of the church spire opposite.
This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect of the ancient basilica the Roman business-hall, compounded of Greek elements, and transformed into a Grecian temple is ever at work repressing that devotional ecstasy which is the characteristic of the Gothic church.
Noting the sharp spire of Burnley Church, relieved against the rounded masses of timber constituting Townley Park; as well as the entrance of the gloomy mountain gorge, known as the Grange of Cliviger; his far-reaching gaze passed over Todmorden, and settled upon the distant summits of Blackstone Edge. Dreary was the prospect on all sides.
The spire, or belfry, is two hundred and ninety feet high. It contains the finest set of chimes in Europe. They play four times an hour, and their music is almost incessant. The machinery by which they are operated consists of an immense metallic cylinder, or drum, covered all over with cogs and pins, like that in a music-box.
The blue slates and the gray stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned hewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape.
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