The same impulse
wreathed the crowning cross with a thousand midsummer fancies, till the
circle of Eternity, or the triangle of Trinity, which often mingled
with its arms, scarcely knew itself. The pinnacles, too, blossomed into
crockets and bud-like finials, and began to gather more thickly about
the roots of the spire, and from them often leaped flying-buttresses
against it. During this time the spire itself was growing more and more
acute, its lines becoming more and more eloquent. After the fourteenth
century, the tower began to be crowned with intricate panelled tracery
of parapets and battlements, from behind which the spire, an entirely
separate structure, shot up into the sky. In this, the period of the
perpendicular style, pinnacles, purfled to the last degree, crowded
about the base of the spire, reminding one of the admiring throng
gathered about the base of some old picture of the Ascension. But there
is another English form which perhaps conveys this sentiment even more
impressively: We refer to that whose prototype exists in the steeple of
the Church of St. Nicholas at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This, however, has
four turrets, one on each angle, from which, with great lightness, leap
towards each other four grand flying-buttresses, which join hands over
an empty void and hold in the air a lantern and spirolet of great
elegance.
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