It was by building on them very delicate pinnacles or
turrets, peopled, perhaps, as at Freiburg, with a silent and serene
concourse of saints in rich niches, or inclosing, as at Strasburg,
spiral open-work stairs. These structures accompanied the tall lantern
through its whole height; thus rendering the entire group a memory,
as it were, of the square tower below, while, at the same time, it
beautifully foreshadowed the octangular character of the sky-seeking
spire above,--a significant symbolism.
Now, when the Belgians and their neighbors received the spire thus from
the fatherland, they at once began to express in it the joy of their
worship by all the embroidery and tender imagery and grotesque conceits
it was capable of receiving. They varied as many changes on it as they
did on their bells. They concealed the first springing of their spires
behind clustering pinnacles, flying-buttresses, canopied niches with
gigantic statues, galleries with battlements and parapets pierced and
mantled in lacework of flamboyant tracery, pointed gables alive with
crockets and finials, and long, quaint dormers,--all with a bewildering
intricacy of enrichment.
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