The highest spire in our own country is
that of Trinity Church, New York, 284 feet. We do not "sweep the cobwebs
from the sky" so effectually as when men built according to the scale
of spiritual exaltation rather than that of practical feet and
inches,--after the stature of the soul, rather than that of the man.
The architects of the revival of classic architecture, with the learned
language of the five orders, with pediments and attics, consoles and
urns, labored to express the childlike sentiment of the spire. But even
the great Sir Christopher Wren, with his sixty steeple-towers, and
all his followers to this day, have not succeeded in a translation so
unnatural. Spirituality and the artless grace of inspiration are wanting
to the spires of the Renaissance, and so they struggle up painfully into
the sky. And it is very rare to find those who have gone back even to
Gothic models building a spire which touches our affections, or claims
affinity with any of our nobler emotions; so sensitive is this unique
structure to the approach of any element foreign to the early conditions
of its existence.
As for the great Strasburg example, that _Jungfrau_ of all spires,
German traditions have very properly babbled many strange stories about
the erection of it.
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