These Italian campaniles had either flat summits, or were crowned with a
low, unimportant roof. But as they approached the North of Lombardy, and
found their way into Germany, France, and Britain, these roofs, through
the necessities of climate, became steeper and sharper. Many of the
little gray mountain-chapels in the South of Switzerland still lift up
these pointed towers amid the hamlets of the valley, having gathered
in the hardy flocks at eventide for seven or eight centuries. The same
early modifications may yet be seen on the banks of the Rhine, where the
conical, stork-haunted caps of the round towers are so picturesquely
associated with that legendary scenery. Those dear, time-worn, rugged,
red-tiled roofs, with their peaks coming in just where they are
needed,--what could the artist do without them? Then the same
necessities made the early French and Norman builders push up into the
air those gaunt, quaint old camelbacks, with spindles or pinnacles
astride. You cannot but love them for their strangeness and the surprise
they make against the quiet sky. In Britain, too, you might have beheld
this tendency, where the lordly curfew quenched the lights in castle and
cot from beneath a very extinguisher of a roof.
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