Unfinished spires were in Europe very common legacies from generation to
generation. Descendants were called upon to embody the great conceptions
of their forefathers. But the ancestral spirit too often failed in the
land, the wing of aspiration was broken, the crane rotted in its place,
the great conceptions were forgotten, or lived only as vague and dreamy
inheritances; and the half-completed spires stood like Sphinxes, and
none knew their riddles! They are very melancholy memorials. Like the
broken columns over the graves of the departed, fallen short of their
natural uses, they seem only the funeral monuments of a race that
is dead. The empty air is stilled over them in expectation, and the
imagination makes vain pictures, and fills out their crescent of
splendid purposes. They have been called "broken promises to God." Too
often, perhaps, they were rather monuments of the feebleness of those
who would scale heaven with anything but adoration upon their lips.
There were Ulm, indeed, and Cologne, and Mechlin, as artistic
intentions, eminently grand and beautiful; and in the early part of the
sixteenth century Belgium was famous for designs of open-work spires,
which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all
hitherto existing.
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