"Spire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Duysberg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonne, Coblentz, Nassau, Hocheim, Frankfort, and made an excursion to Hanau, then to Mayence, and another excursion to Rudesheim, and Johansberg; then by Oppenheim, Worms, and Manheim, making an excursion to Heidelberg, then by Spire, Carlsruhe, Rastadt, and Kelh, to Sfrasburg, where I arrived April the 16th, and proceeded again on the 18th, by Phalsbourg, Fenestrange, Dieuze, Moyenvie, Nancy, Toul, Ligny, Barleduc, St. Diziers, Vitry, Chalons sur Marne, Epernay, Chateau Thierri, Meaux, to Paris, where I arrived ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... panoramic from the farmhouse ridge, with a glory of light. Milk-white clouds capped the western hills. Nearer, dotted peacefully with farms, red barns and dark, straggling clumps of evergreen, the rolling valley stretched unevenly among intersecting lines of trees. At the foot of a hill rose the spire of the village church. To the south a crystal ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire, and intermixed with frequent heaps of verdure, where trees threw up their shade from unseen trunks. Beyond was the bay and its islands, almost the only objects, in a country unmarked by strong natural features, on which time and human toil had produced no change. Retaining these portions of the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the former depicted in delightfully distorted perspective and the latter by two or three half-circular strokes. That there may be no confusion between church and inn, the possibility of which is suggested by the fact that several of the latter are adorned with spire-like embellishments, the sixteenth-century cartographer told which were which in so many words. It is by close attention to the letter-press, and by observing the frequent appearance of names which have age-long association ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... But clear and artless, pouring through the plain Health to the sick, and solace to the swain. Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows? Whose seats the weary traveller repose? Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise? "The Man of Ross," each lisping babe replies. Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread! The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread; He feeds yon almshouse, neat, but void of state, Where age and want sit smiling at the gate; Him portioned ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... buildings which had shouldered each other in that wonderful district, turning the streets into immense gorges, had, to a certain extent, protected one another against the effects of the waves, and the skeletons of many were yet standing. In the midst of them the dark spire of old Trinity still pointed stoutly upward, as if continuing its hopeless struggle against the spirit of worldly grandeur whose aspiring creations, though in ruins, yet dwarfed this symbol of immortality. At the intersection of the Wall and Broad ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... will bidde you off To Conventre, or Yorke, or Jericho; But be not you, my booke, abashed by scoff, For I will teach you where you boun to go,— Which is in Gloucestershire, there unto Bisley, Where the church spire is spied long afarre; It is not either uncouth, square, or grisly, But soareth high, as if to catch a starre; Where shall the brother of the Christian Yeare, Keble, hereafter tend the seven springs, Above whose fountains ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... same seal. A church, with central spire, a cross at each gable end, masoned walls imitating ashlar-work, and traceried windows, standing on a ship with a castle at each end, that on the left pointed, that on the right square, on ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... formed a continuation of the terraced inclines. And at last, from the summit sprang the Basilica, somewhat slender and frail, recalling some finely chased jewel of the Renascence, and looking very new and very white—like a prayer, a spotless dove, soaring aloft from the rocks of Massabielle. The spire, which appeared the more delicate and slight when compared with the gigantic inclines below, seemed like the little vertical flame of a taper set in the midst of the vast landscape, those endless waves of valleys and mountains. By the side, too, of the dense greenery of the Calvary hill, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... yonder lane, And the little church stands near, The church where we were wed, Mary, I see the spire from here. But the graveyard lies between, Mary, And my step might break your rest— For I've laid you, darling! down to sleep, With your baby on ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... up stream, to the northward, stood a small wooden house, on the beach in front of which a shabby old mariner was bailing out his boat. Southwards, some miles away, curved the shadowed edge of the city, a spire mounting here and there, a pencilled mist of smoke from chimneys, a fringe of thready masts around the farthest point. In front slid ceaselessly away the vast sweep of levelled water, and still it came undiminished on. The opposing shore was a mile distant, its rocky front ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the morning the sun gets up From behind the village spire; And the children dream, that the first red gleam Is the chestnut trees ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... they floated on through the tall grasses fringing the banks, or circled about the lily-pads growing in the eddies. In the middle of the meadow, just where two white ribbons of roads crossed, was a clump of trees pierced by a church-spire. Outside of this bower of green—a darker green than the velvet meadow- grass about it—glistened the roofs and windows of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Fourth avenue and Twenty-second street, is a beautiful structure. It is built of white marble, in the Romanesque style. The Rectory, adjoining it, is of the same material. It is the gift of Daniel Drew to the congregation. The spire is 210 feet high, and the church ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of my youth, Seat of Friendship and Truth, Where Love chac'd each fast-fleeting year, Loth to leave thee I mourn'd, For a last look I turn'd, But thy spire was scarce ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... but in reality the waters are clear as crystal. Beyond these groves, still looking south, you discover the woods about Wardour Castle, and amongst them the silvery gleam of another sheet of water. To the south-west is the giant spire of Salisbury, which since the fall of Fonthill Tower now reigns in solitary stateliness over these vast regions of down and desert. Stourton Tower presents itself to the north, whilst to the west, in the extreme distance, ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... in the mail in which I read: "On a certain street corner in Chicago stands a handsome church where hundreds of worshippers gather every Sabbath morning for prayer and praise. Just a little way off, almost within the shadow of its spire, lived, or rather herded, in a dark, damp basement, a family of eight—father, mother, and six children. For all the influence that the songs or the sermons or the prayers had upon them they might have lived there and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... the golden coomb; The sun went west with horns of fire; Athwart the sweet, sea-breathing room The swallows swooped; the village spire Glowed red against a gleam of broom; While earth its scented secrets told, There, silent, sunset-aureoled, Sat Iolaeus, ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... Mrs. John Shadrack had been entertaining me, or I had been entertaining her, I had not the remotest idea. A very long while ago I had seen a spire of smoke curling through the trees in Happy Valley, and I had been told that it was from her hearth. Then we had gone plunging madly down the hill to it, Tip, the gray colt and I. We had turned a sharp bend, we had heard ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... now at even-close Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long Her eyes were on the ground; 'tis July, strong Now; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... with the ends pendant, a thumb and two fingers. The caduceus again the conspicuous part of the sacred Triad Ashur is symbolized by a single stone placed upright,—the stump of a tree, a block, a tower, a spire, minaret, pole, pine, poplar or ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Two hundred and thirty years afterwards Sir Christopher Wren restored Islip's work, and designed the upper portions. The edifice is not yet complete, as the square central tower requires a lofty spire to complete it. ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... strange country. Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire, until we had crossed the Ohio River. In power upon the emotions nothing, I think, is comparable to a first sight of mountains. To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... edifice of British bricks, with its semicircular choir next the street, and, adjoining the choir, a spire of more modern brickwork built up to an open bell cupola, and open ribbed dome, also of brick, tipped with a gilded cross, the ivy was greenly matted all round the choir, and ran along the side of the church, where Levin Dennis walked under four tall, round-topped windows of stained and wired glass, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... replied the official, who knew Toby very well, and doubtless his stuttering also. "Well, what's happened this Sunday, Toby? Storm knock a chimney down at your place? It would only make six I've heard from, not to speak of the church spire ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... mountains rise, And lose their snowy summits in the skies; Above those mountains proud Olympus towers, The parliamental seat of heavenly powers. New to the sight, my ravish'd eyes admire Each gilded crescent and each antique spire, The marble mosques, beneath whose ample domes Fierce warlike sultans sleep in peaceful tombs; Those lofty structures, once the Christians boast, Their names, their beauty, and their honours lost; Those altars bright with gold and ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... force of the wind increased to such a degree that several houses on Genesee Street Hill were unroofed, and the spire of the Second Presbyterian Church ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the blue waters of Lake Lucerne mirrored the glowing colors of the mountain-peaks beyond its farther shore, and nearer, among the foothills of old Pilatus itself, a little village nestled among green trees, its roofs clustered about a white church-spire. Now the bells in the steeple began to ring, and the sound floated out across the green fields spangled with yellow daffodils, and reached Mother Adolf where she stood. Bells from more distant villages soon joined in the clamor, until all the air was filled ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... track of the glass-and-steel structures that had been springing up daily along the Fifth-Madison Thruway. When Tom and Livia stepped out of the cab in front of 320, he wasn't surprised that the building—an odd, cylindrical affair with a pointed spire—was strange to him. But he was taken aback to realize that all sixty floors were the property ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... course we have tracked from the lonely anchorage in the Typa, down the China Seas, across the Indian Ocean, and over the wide expanse of the Atlantic, sinks slowly to night behind the mountains of our own broad and beautiful land. They gild the spire of an ancient village church, beneath which, in the days that are no more, our youthful ears drank in the kindly teachings of the gray-headed and venerable man, now forming one of the congregation ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... production? The Greeks and he are alike and alone in this, and for the same reason, that both are unapproachably the highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like, but the inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clustered masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither Greek nor Gothic,—it is simply genius lending itself to embody the new desire of man's mind, as it had embodied the old. After all, to be delightful is to be classic, and the chaotic never pleases long. But manifoldness is not confusion, any more than formalism ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gathered in their harvests, adorned their cities, pleaded, traded, and studied in security. Many of our noblest architectural monuments belong to that age. Then rose the fair chapels of New College and of Saint George, the nave of Winchester and the choir of York, the spire of Salisbury and the majestic towers of Lincoln. A copious and forcible language, formed by an infusion of French into German, was now the common property of the aristocracy and of the people. Nor was it long before genius began to apply that admirable machine ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Friesland, St. Willfried and St. Willibrod, especially the latter, had intimate relations with Pepin of Heristal, and received from him effectual support. More than twenty bishoprics, amongst others those of Utrecht, Mayence, Ratisbonne, Worms, and Spire, were founded at this epoch; and one of those ardent pioneers of Christian civilization, the Irish bishop, St. Lievin, martyred in 656 near Ghent, of which he has remained the patron saint, wrote in verse to his friend Herbert, a little before his martyrdom, "I have seen a sun without rays, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... gathering and from the pilot-house by Watson, Mrs. Gilmore, and "Harriet," a small procession followed the priest and the three boxes—borne by white-jackets—ashore and out of sight where a small wooden church spire, inland behind the bluff, peered over its crest. Madame Hayle leaned on Julian's arm, Ramsey on Lucian's, Hugh walked with Marburg, the senator with the general, the first clerk with Ned, the Californian ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... power." There is the unconscious expression of one of the great minds of the world. Bacon was like one of the architects of the Middle Ages, who drew his plans for a mighty cathedral, perfect in every detail from the deep foundation stone to the cross on the highest spire, and who gave over his plans to the builders, knowing that, in his own lifetime, only one tiny chapel would be completed; but knowing also that the very beauty of his plans would appeal to others, and that succeeding ages would finish the work which ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... water-meadows before your hairs are grey, under the wise new fishing-laws?—when Winchester apprentices shall covenant, as they did three hundred years ago, not to be made to eat salmon more than three days a week; and fresh-run fish shall be as plentiful under Salisbury spire as they are in Holly-hole at Christchurch; in the good time coming, when folks shall see that, of all Heaven's gifts of food, the one to be protected most carefully is that worthy gentleman salmon, who is generous enough to ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... chateau, beyond the Rhine, a market town, with neat houses carefully whitewashed and with gardens attached, spreads itself around a little cove, like a fan. Upon the right of this great village a rustic church reflects the sun from its tinned spire; on the left, some large mills show their lazily turning wheels, and behind these mills, the church and the market town, extends the fertile plain which I have just endeavored to describe to you, and which I cannot praise too much. Oh! charming landscape! This afternoon I was ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... spire Reflected the sunset's fading fire; The wigwam sent up its faint blue smoke, The owlet's shrill cry the stillness broke, While the small rude huts of the settlers stood Within ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... down yonder, lies Rouen, that large town with its blue roofs, under its pointed Gothic towers. They are innumerable, delicate or broad, dominated by the spire of the cathedral, and full of bells which sound through the blue air on fine mornings, sending their sweet and distant iron clang to me; their metallic sound which the breeze wafts in my direction, now stronger and now weaker, according as the wind ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... other cathedrals we have got.” {121c} Viewed in the distance, from the neighbourhood of Woodhall Spa, its three towers seem to coalesce into one, almost of pyramidal form, to crown the hill on which it stands. That form was once more lofty, and more pointed, for each of the three towers had a spire. An entry in the Minster Archives records the fall of the largest—ruina magnæ pyramidis—in 1547. In 1808 the two other lesser spires were taken down, not without strong remonstrances and much skirmishing ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the blasted tree sliced by shell-fire, the upturned railway—truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-line, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In "quiet" sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual shell-fire or snipers' bullets, and that became part of the boredom. "What casualties?" ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... are struck by lightning is because they project up into the air, and according to their height, they remove a corresponding amount of the poorly conducting air. If the lower edge of a thunder-cloud is two thousand five hundred feet above the air, and the spire of a church is five hundred feet high, it follows that it is easier for a flash to jump two thousand feet than two thousand five hundred. So when the electricity-bearing cloud comes over the church spire the flash will leap to the church, five hundred feet of obstacle being ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... valley, hemmed in by mountains. The ledges on the hillsides spread out in some places so as to afford sufficient breadths for cultivation; occasional hamlets appear amidst the fields and pine-woods; and far up, between you and the sky, an occasional church spire peeps up, indicating still loftier settlements, though how the people contrive to climb up to those heights is a wonder to the spectator ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... through this rhinoceros hide, thank you. How exquisitely the mist is curling up, and showing the church-spire ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hurrying to and fro, saw surgeons passing up, or men coming down carrying a stretcher, where lay a long white figure whose face was shrouded, and whose fight was done. Sometimes I stopped to watch the passers in the street, the moonlight shining on the spire opposite, or the gleam of some vessel floating, like a white-winged sea-gull, down the broad Potomac, whose fullest flow can never wash away the red stain of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... others may employ their industry in forming such products as it may be desirable to exchange with them. Schools are generally established, and the rudiments of education universally diffused. Religion is taught, and every village has its church, neat, though humble, lifting its spire to heaven. Here is a situation apparently the most favorable to happiness. I say apparently, for the greatest source of human misery is not in external circumstances, but in men themselves—in their depraved inclinations, their wayward passions and perverse wills. Here is room for all ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the saints and kings in stony state, As if with breath and human soul expand. Well may'st thou be astounded—view it well; Go not from hence before thou see thy fill, And learn the builder's virtues and his name. Of this tall spire in every country tell, And with thy tale the lazy rich men shame; Show how the glorious Canning did excel; How he, good man, a friend for kings became, And glorious paved at once the way ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... tower, yellow spire, old clock and weathercock, seems to me as I look back on it to have been a very attractive piece of architecture. It was that church which suggested to Emerson the leading thought in one of his ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... in the heart of the city, amid the roar and din of commerce. And how different the smoky atmosphere in which the great Dome is enshrouded, to the clear, bright air of Milan, where every delicate spire, every graceful projection with its play of light and shadow, is seen to perfection, and the pure whiteness of the marble is unsullied by the soot and dirt which form, alas! a complete veil to our own ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... up the Valley there were pointed out to us the Three Brothers, a triple group of rocks, three thousand eight hundred feet high. Cathedral Spire, Sentinel Rock, Yosemite and Lost Arrow Falls, and all the other points of interest that can be ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... regarding me as one from whom fortune met the most ungrateful returns. At every new turn of the road he would endeavor to attract my attention by the objects around,—no white-turreted chateau, no tapered spire in the distance, escaped him; he kept up a constant ripple of half-muttered praise and censure upon all he saw, and instituted unceasing comparisons between the country and his own, in which, I am bound to say, Ireland rarely, if ever, had to ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... of the greatest building which Rome ever produced—the Coliseum. The sides rose at an angle of 52 deg. 10'; and the perpendicular height was four hundred and fifty-four feet, or fifty feet more than that of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The cubic contents are estimated at 71,670,000 feet; and their weight is calculated at 5,309,000 tons. Numbers of this vast amount convey but little idea of the reality to an ordinary reader, and require to be ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... forty miles against its obstructing current. No scheme of colonisation has ever been designed or thought of by them; for it is only near its source, as we have seen, that settlements exist. In the Chaco no white man's town ever stood upon its banks, nor church spire flung shadow athwart its ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... liturgical question, and, in addition, a proposition boldly practical in the Kyrie, the spire of your Cathedral. The inspiration and structure of it are certainly admirable..."omnia excelsa tua et fluctus tui super me transierunt." Nevertheless, during these 300 bars, about, of a slow and almost ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... you see now, on the water-side, is the Viceroy's palace; that to the right, again, is the convent of the barefooted Carmelites: yon lofty spire is the cathedral of St Catherine, and that beautiful and light piece of architecture is the church of our Lady of Pity. You observe there a building, with a dome, rising behind ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to The Golden Legend, we have the attempt of Lucifer and the Powers of the Air to tear down the cross from the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral, with the remonstrance of the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... pensioners pass on in rotation from the unendowed to the endowed rooms. They must be Roman Catholics and exceed the age of sixty years before they are received. On the north side of the quadrangle is the Roman Catholic parish church, a fine building in the Gothic style, with a high spire and moulded entrance doorway, built ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... for a moment on the outside. The spire points upward and teaches its lesson of aspiration. "Lift up your hearts," it seems to say, and holds up the Cross as that by which alone we are to be "exalted unto everlasting life." Whenever we {19} lift ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary, Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird, Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles, Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and also at about half-height with a crown of thorns. The different sides of the Chapelle are in the same style—with buttresses between the windows, gables surmounting these, and a fine open parapet crowning all. The roof is sloping, and the height is over a hundred feet. The spire measures, from the vaulting, seventy feet. We entered by a stair-case the upper chapel, and an exquisite view presented itself. A single apartment, a half-circular chair, with fine, large windows, detached columns with bases and capitals, and fine groining—these all strike the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... boundary of one-half of the garden; a mass of sober magnificence, rising in calm repose against the sky, which, to my awe-struck gaze and childish imagination, seemed to rest upon its exquisitely formed spire. Seated on the grass, busying my fingers with the daisies that were permitted to spring around, I have been lost in such imaginings as I suppose not many little children indulge in, while permitting my eyes to ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... he added to Westminster Abbey would almost lead us to doubt if he had not a vacancy somewhere in his brain. But the dome of the London "State-House" is very graceful,—so light that it looks as if Its lineage had been crossed by a spire. Wait until we have gilded the dome of our Boston St. Paul's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... one side only is now remaining. This tower was despoiled of its spire in 1557. The Choir and Lady-Chapel are almost entirely gone. They were of pointed architecture; and it appears that they were erected during some of the latter years of the thirteenth century, or at the commencement of ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... spring she has drawn back the curtains. A window is in the wall opposite, and lo! the mist is cleared away. The indulgent moon is out again, revoyaging the plumbless sky. Roof and parapet and spire are softly pearl enamelled. Twice, thrice the retrieved river flashes back, between the houses, the light of the firmament. A tonic day will dawn, sweet ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... much connected with Yarmouth in his young days, when his father was the incumbent of the parish church. Some of his boyish pranks were peculiar. Here is one of them: 'Having taken two pillows from his mother's bed, he carried them up the spire of Yarmouth Church, at a time when the wind was blowing from the north-east; and as soon as he had ascended as high as he could, he ripped them open, and, shaking out their contents, dispersed them in the air. The feathers were carried away by the wind, and fell far and wide over ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... and examined other pictures and works of art; and then, after paying the keeper of the tower a franc, they commenced the long ascent to the spire and chimes. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... to negotiate a turn off to the right down a side road. We seemed to take that corner on two wheels. A thin church spire protruded from the trees in the centre of the group of houses which we were approaching so furiously. The village was all but deserted: everybody seemed to be indoors at their midday meal, but Francis slowed down and ran along the dirty street at a demure pace. The village passed, he jammed ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... while the last stars were lingering in the sky and the east was suffused with a faint pink haze, a scarlet spire shot up that was not sunrise. No one remarked it at first. Then a broad flash that might have been lightning but was not, and a cry on the still air startled the sleepers. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... by surprise, and meets you at every turn; the light airy rooms where religious prints and ornaments, with flowers, birds, and ingenious toys, testify that innocent enjoyments are encouraged and smiled upon, while from every window may be caught a glimpse of the Eternal City, a spire, a ruined wall,—something that speaks of Rome and its thousand charms. On Holy Thursday no sepulchre is more beautiful than that of Tor di Specchi. Flowers without end, and bright hangings, all sweet and costly ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... the scene to utter a word; the minarets of the mosques, the vast spire of Shway Dagon, the famous pagoda, its crest of gold glittering in the last rays of the sun; the crowd of masts, the native boats, the swift little sampans darting hither and thither, the quaint up-river craft, the Chinese junks—all was so ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... seriously. "The saying is that there has been as much of sand laid on the road between Rotterdam and The Hague as would reach the top of the cathedral spire at Amsterdam, which you will ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... magic crystal glitter seen only at that time of autumn. The Sparrow Hills were visible in the distance, with the village, the church, and the large white house. The bare trees, the sand, the bricks and roofs of the houses, the green church spire, and the corners of the white house in the distance, all stood out in the transparent air in most delicate outline and with unnatural clearness. Near by could be seen the familiar ruins of a half-burned mansion occupied by the French, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... architecture, in which every shaft, arch, vault-girdle, pillar, window-frame, pinnacle, seems struggling and panting upward with an almost audible eloquence. This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect of the ancient basilica—the Roman business-hall, compounded of Greek elements, and transformed into a Grecian temple—is ever at work repressing that devotional ecstasy which is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the afternoon. The statues and sculptures of this side of the same portal were licked by the flames and scorched through and through. The eight bells in this tower also were caught by the flames, and the whole thing fell down near the cross aisle of the transept. The spire of the Belfry of the Angel, at the apse, fell, and with it disappeared the leaden heads which decorated its base. In the interior the sculptures and the walls of the edifice were damaged by fire in the straw which had been strewn about for the German wounded; the great eighteenth century ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... in which the golden cock on the church spire is the recipient of enchanting stories of enchanted people and places. Full of pretty and ingenious ideas, ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... are in Quebec to-day. Quebec is French to the core, not in loyalty to republican France, but in loyalty to the religious ideals which the founders brought to the banks of the St. Lawrence three centuries ago. Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of Quebec. From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New Hampshire, you can follow the thread ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... strain; Whose own hand cloth'd this far-fam'd hill With rev'rend elms, that shade us still; Whose mem'ry shall survive the day, When elms and empires feel decay. KYRL die, by bard ennobled? Never; "The Man of Ross" shall live for ever; Ross, that exalts its spire on high, Above the flow'ry-margin'd WYE, Scene of the morrow's joy, that prest Its unseen beauties on our rest In dreams; but who of dreams would tell, Where truth sustains the song ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... eastward, and southward to the Gulf, the Tubercled or Small Pale Green Orchis (H. flava) lifts a spire of inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers, more attractive to the eye of the structural botanist than to the aesthete. It blooms in moist places, as most orchids do, since water with which to manufacture ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale, hugest of beasts that live, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... church edifice which graces this sightly spot, though sadly dealt with in its general symmetry, still lifts its lofty spire with undiminished beauty, and justifies the stirring lines ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... into the waiting boats, was enough to correct the impression. They beheld a town of sufficiently imposing proportions composed of houses built upon European notions of architecture, but without any of the huddle usual in European cities. The spire of a church rose dominantly above the red roofs, a fort guarded the entrance of the wide harbour, with guns thrusting their muzzles between the crenels, and the wide facade of Government House revealed itself dominantly placed on a gentle hill above the town. This hill was vividly green ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... the Agnus Dei, and the ringing of church bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest peasants in eastern France, when they observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by lightning, was once and for all protected ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... carriage-window as the train whirled rapidly through the scarcely awakened country, and she had seen the soft and beautiful landscapes of the South lit up by the early sunlight. How the bright little villages shone, with here and there a gilt weathercock glittering on the spire of some small gray church, while as yet in many valleys a pale gray mist lay along the bed of the level streams or clung to the dense woods on the upland heights! Which was the more beautiful—the sharp, clear picture, with its brilliant colors ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... wall excluded any glimpse of the Bishop's garden, and beyond loomed the Cathedral, with two grey pigeons circling about its spire. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... journey, but a moment later he discovered his mistake. It was suddenly borne in upon him that the tall, thin object which nestled so closely among the trees a mile to the south that it was scarcely distinguishable from them, was in reality the spire of some church; and he knew that he was much closer to his kind than ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of Pickering, the town has a picturesque and pleasant site. At the top of the market-place where the ground becomes much steeper stands the church, its grey bulk dominating every view. From all over the Vale one can see the tall spire, and from due east or west it has a surprising way of peeping over the hill tops. It has even been suggested that the tower and spire have been a landmark for a very long time, owing to the fact that where the hills and ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... Myolonghee, and brought down the Meinam in rafts. These trunks, planted thirty feet deep, one at each corner of a square, serve as pillars, not less than a hundred and seventy feet high, to support a sixty-foot spire, an octagonal pyramid, covered with gold leaf. Attached to this pyramid are four wings, forty feet long, with handsome porches looking to the cardinal points of the compass; here also are four colossal figures of heroic myths, each with a ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... he spoke, the form of Satan loomed In sight, all crimson with reflections's fire, Like some tall tower or cathedral spire Touched by the dawn while all the earth is gloomed In mists and shadows of the night time. "Sire," Said Waterman, his agitable wick Still sputtering, "what calls you back so quick? It scarcely was a century ago You left us." "I have come to bring," said ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... convents, turning every window on the west to fire and transforming a multitude of towers and turrets and minarets to glittering gold. Small wonder, indeed, that all our rough tripmen stopped paddling and with eyes on the spire of Notre Dame des Victoires muttered prayers for a prosperous voyage. For some reason or other, I found my own hat off. So was Mr. Jack MacKenzie's, so was Eric Hamilton's. Then the voyageurs fell ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the girl's heart a little glint of youthful joy, which was unusual. She had met Mr. Von Rosen and had forgotten herself, that is at first, and he had looked kindly at her. There was no foolish hope in little Annie Eustace's heart; there would be no spire of aspiration added to her dreams because of the meeting, but she tasted the sweet of approbation, and it was a tonic which she sorely needed, and which inspired her to self-assertion in a childishly naughty and mischievous way. It was after supper that ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lashings of the nearer waves, like the roar of artillery. There is a sublimity of desolation on its shores, the effects of a conflict maintained for ages, and on a scale so gigantic. The isolated, spire-like crags that rise along its base, are so drilled and bored by the incessant lashings of the surf, and are ground down into shapes so fantastic, that they seem but the wasted skeletons of their former selves; and we find almost every natural fissure in the solid rock hollowed into an immense ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... hammock (on a sociable, shady terrace, from which the ground drops), and looks at red Rye, across the marshes. Another garden where a contemplative hammock would be in order is the lovely canonical plot at Salisbury, with the everlasting spire above it tinted in the summer sky—unless, in the same place, you should choose to hook yourself up by the grassy bank of the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the meadows, the cattle, the distant willows across the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... he could see the spire of the little church on the hill, and when the steamer rounded the point, affording a full view of the town, and sounded her whistle as a signal for those on the shore to come to the pier, Toby could hardly restrain himself from jumping ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... climbing, higher and higher, The branches blow and I see a spire, The gleam of a turret, the glint of a dome, All sparkling and bright, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... fallen upon Paris affected all classes alike. Every feeling of pity seemed to have been blotted out. Natural affection disappeared. A man's foes were those of his own household. On the plea of religious zeal the most barbarous acts were committed. Spire Niquet, a poor bookbinder, whose scanty earnings barely sufficed to support the wants of his seven children, was half-roasted in a bonfire made of his own books, and then dragged to the river and drowned.[1018] The ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... was marvellous. The water a flood of pink and green and gold; the sails of the vessels along the shore lit up resplendently; the buildings of the city beyond sent back occasional flashes of reflected light from window glass or church spire. It was a picture worth looking upon, and Kate's companion was ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... truant love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind, A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind, Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, Of merriest days, of love and Islington, Kindling anew the flames of past desire; And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, To the green plains of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn, and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city, releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning chants coming from many a church door and convent ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ground, and the landscape showed a pleasing alternation of hill and dale, intersected by a river, which was in some places visible, and hidden in others, where it rolled betwixt deep and wooded banks. The spire of a church, and the appearance of some houses, indicated the situation of a village at the place where the stream had its junction with the ocean. The vales seemed well cultivated, the little enclosures into which they were divided skirting the bottom of the hills, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... his eye." Stirling, in his Annals of Spanish Artists, says, that of no prince are recorded more sayings which show a refined taste and a quick eye. He told the Burghers of Antwerp that, "the light and soaring spire of their cathedral deserved to be put under a glass case." He called Florence "the Queen of the Arno, decked for a perpetual holiday." He regretted that he had given his consent for the conversion of the famous mosque of Abderahman at Cordova into a cathedral, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... there are indeed these high mysteries of friendship, and I can be glad to discern them afar off, as the dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-swept farm, can see, far away in the woodland valley, the smoke go up from happy cottage-chimneys, nestled in leaves, and the spire point a hopeful finger up to heaven. Life would be a poorer thing if we had all that we desired, and it is permitted to hope that if we are faithful with our few things, we may be made rulers ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... measure wall and foss— The Soldan rode; and all day long he rode For Pavia; passing basilic, and shrine, And gaze of vineyard-workers, wotting not Yon trader was the Lord of Heathenesse. All day he rode; yet at the wane of day No gleam of gate, or ramp, or rising spire, Nor Tessin's sparkle underneath the stars Promised him Pavia; but he was 'ware Of a gay company upon the way, Ladies and lords, with horses, hawks, and hounds: Cap-plumes and tresses fluttered by the wind Of merry race for home. "Go!" said the ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... yard From the shining leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement, where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then, a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative scent on the air. And ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... part of the town on the right or north bank, is St. Aspais, an elegant church of the 14th cent. surrounded by crocketed gabled chapels. By the side of the main entrance rises a buttressed square tower, terminating in a high peaked roof prolonged into a short spire. In the interior are some delicately sculptured canopy work and 8 windows with valuable old glass. A few yards off the main street is the Hotel de Ville with a round attached turret in each corner; and in the centre of the court a marble statue to Jacques Amyot, born in 1514, "Un des Grandes ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... spire, The little speedwell's darling blue, Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew, Laburnums, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... true, thus far. There were no roses blooming on Archie's cheeks yet; and sometimes, when Lilias watched his pale face, as he sat gazing out into the mist, she was painfully reminded of the time when he used to watch the shadow of the spire coming slowly round to the ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... songs." So the church arises,—in Germany, in France, in England,—solemn, mystical, massive, a type of sorrow, in the form of a cross, with "a sepulchral crypt like the man in the tomb, before the lofty spire pointed to the man who had risen to Heaven." The church is still struggling, and is not jubilant, except in Gregorian chants, and is not therefore lofty or ornamental. It is a vault. It is more like a catacomb than a basilica, for the world is buried deep in sorrows and fears. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... and miles the shattered ruins spread Beneath its base, from captive tempests bred, The air seemed filled with harmony strange and dire; While swarmed around the entire human race A future Babel, on the world's whole space Fixed its eternal spire. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... shows no sign of human habitation, that knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at home—wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air with its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky and, in the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these fertile ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... White Horse Inn and the Lamb Tavern. A little farther, and he beheld the Province House, a building with a cupola surmounted by a spire. The weather-vane was an Indian with bow and arrow. The king's arms, carved and gilded, were upon the balcony above the doorway. Chestnut trees shaded the green plot of ground between the building and the street. A soldier with his musket on his shoulder was standing ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... horn-coloured, finely transversely striated species, with an acute elevated spire. We have named it after Mr. T. Phillips, who has assiduously collected many new ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... Galt's house, and turning into Grace Street strolled leisurely in the direction of the Capitol Square. The night was sharp with frost and a rising wind drove the shadows on the pavement against darkened house-fronts, while behind a far-off church spire, a wizened moon shivered through a thin cloud. On the silence came the sound of fire bells ringing in ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... from beyond the Wye; neither Father Jerome nor his other lieutenant, John, was present. Windybank stretched himself on the grass just above the water, being determined to say nothing to any man. He fell to contemplating the tall spire of Westbury Church, which stood out like a blurred finger in the darkness. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... there was no staying at Frankfort. The chancellor Oxenstiern removed to Magdeburg, Duke Bernhard and the Landgrave marched into Alsatia, and the Imperialists carried all before them for all the rest of the campaign. They took Philipsburg by surprise; they took Augsburg by famine, Spire and Treves by sieges, taking the Elector prisoner. But this success did one piece of service to the Swedes, that it brought the French into the war on their side, for the Elector of Treves was their confederate. The French gave the conduct of the war to Duke Bernhard. This, though ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... The Ball-Room, with its painted sky Where heavy angels seem to fly, Is a dull place; its size and gloom Make them prefer, for drawing-room, The Library, all done up new And comfortable, with a view Of Salisbury Spire between the boughs. When she had shown me through the house, (I wish I could have let her know That she herself was half the show; She is so handsome, and so kind!) She fetch'd the children, who had dined; And, taking one ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... a time, leaning, sick and faint from the violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the peaks of ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hotel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... than as a last resort," he replied. "Hast ever heard of the Temple of the Sun? It is there that they will put her. It lies far within the inner court of the Temple of Issus, a little temple that raises a thin spire far above the spires and minarets of the great temple that surrounds it. Beneath it, in the ground, there lies the main body of the temple consisting in six hundred and eighty-seven circular chambers, one below another. To each chamber ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Officer there, and was therefore not able further to see the progress of the work that he had inspired. His plans, however, were carefully followed by his successor, with the exception, as has already been said, of substituting a spire for a tower, owing to undue settlement at the tower end. This building is 250 feet long internally, by 65 feet in width, with nave and side aisles; or, with the north and south transepts, 95 feet, the transepts being used as porticoes. ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... have seen just one window we think all are of the same form and are convinced that the inn is a mansion. Or again, we see, half-covered, through the woods, a distant pool, and in memory we then see the possibly, but not necessarily, present river. Or perhaps we see a church spire, and possibly near it the roof of a house rises above the trees; then we are inducted into having seen a village, although there really are visible only the church and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... light from some library or sitting-room window, accompanied by the tones of a piano or guitar,—or sound of laughing voices. And the house of God stood silent, dark and cold, with the figure of the Christ upon the window and the spire, like a giant ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... Church (Vol. ii., p. 494.), which is referred to by your correspondent, is the first instance, I believe, of the application of a new material to the construction of an ecclesiastical edifice. It is built throughout, walls, tower, and spire, benches and fittings, of terra cotta from the Ladyshore works. The architect is that accomplished antiquary, Mr. Sharpe of Lancaster, who furnished the designs of every part, from which moulds were made, and in these the composition forming the terra cotta was prepared, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... its high-pitched roof, and airy, but inelegant, campanile, refulgent as if cut from some rock of diamond. Nearer, was the Court House, and, beneath it, the Jail; and, behind them both, the dusky expanse of the poplar-planted Champ de Mars. In the midst of the city rose the tin-mailed tower and spire of the French Cathedral, and, at its rear, loomed the neighboring, wall-girt, solemn Seminary of Saint Sulpice. The bright, precipitous roof of the Church of the Recollets, and the spangled canopy of the vast foundation of the Grey Nuns reposed resplendent; ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... have often wished ourselves "far from the sight of city, spire, or sound of minster clock." One feels most for the sheep and lambs, when the softened fancy recurs to the streams and hedgerows, and pleasant pastures, from whence the woolly exiles have been ejected; and yet the emotion of pity isnot wholly unaccompanied by admiration at the sagacity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... wheat and corn from the soil than gold. Only a few days ago I was where they wrench the precious metals from the miserly clutch of the rocks. When I saw the mountains, treeless, shrub-less, flowerless, without even a spire of grass, it seemed to me that gold had the same effect upon the country that holds it, as upon the man who lives and labors only for that. It affects the land as it does the man. It leaves the heart barren without a flower of kindness—without ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say, in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"—being offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the point of breaking, unless you are idiots, acknowledge that you said to yourselves: "I am in the right. Here, and here alone, lies man's part. I am entering on a path, beaten and worn, but straight; I shall cross the weary downs, but each step will bring me nearer the village spire. I am not wandering through life, I am marching on, I stir with my feet the dust in which my father has planted his. My child, on the same road, will find the traces of my footsteps, and, perhaps, on seeing that I have not faltered, will say: 'Let me act like my old father and not lose myself ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance and observed its path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the woods that surrounded it and the range of mountain above mountain ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... roofs thus visible to Paula over the window-sill, with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in airy openwork, forming the highest object in the scene; it suggested something which for a long time she appeared unwilling to utter; but ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... The plans of Bampton, Burford, and Witney, show how the builders of west Oxfordshire experimented in cruciform planning. The division between chancel and nave is felt much less at Witney than in the other two churches; for the great thirteenth century tower and spire, resting upon massive piers joined by pointed arches, throw a considerable portion of their weight upon nave and transept arcades, whose exceptional massiveness gives unity to the whole design. In the fifteenth century, ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... perfect of landlocked harbours. A great cliff rises on the left,—Quirpon Point they call it,—and clinging to its base like an overgrown limpet is a tiny cottage, with its inevitable fish stage. Farther along are more houses; then a white church with a pointed spire, and a bright-green building near by, while across the path is a very pretty square green school. Next are the Mission buildings in a group. Beyond them come more small houses—"Little Labrador" I learned later that this group is called, ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... travelled onward, the ruined city began to grow upon him in ever heavier and darker mass. Here and there a half-demolished church-spire raised itself above the neighboring roof-line; plainly this had been one of the old-time residential sections and of the better class. Still farther down the stream and the water-front stood crowded thickly ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... with a fine spire, and might invite a traveller to survey it; but I, perhaps, wanted vigour, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... windings through the leafless forest, until it united its waters to those of the Calder, and swept on in swifter and clearer current, to wash the base of Whalley Abbey. But the watcher's survey did not stop here. Noting the sharp spire of Burnley Church, relieved against the rounded masses of timber constituting Townley Park; as well as the entrance of the gloomy mountain gorge, known as the Grange of Cliviger; his far-reaching gaze passed over Todmorden, and settled upon the distant ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the belfry as he passed under it, and at the same moment, from beneath the high, gilded dragon which crowned its topmost spire, a sweet bell-note floated, another, others succeeding in crystalline sweetness, linked in a fragment of some ancient melody. Then they ceased; then came a brief silence; the great bell he had heard ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... return to it covered with renown; that his name would become the boast and the glory of his native place; that his ashes would be religiously guarded as its most precious treasure; and that its lessening spire, on which his eyes were fixed with tearful contemplation, would one day become the beacon, towering amidst the gentle landscape, to guide the literary pilgrim of every ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... salvation in the present going to pieces. I have always felt this instinctively. It came to me clearly only a few years ago. It is a bad thing to become wholly loosened from the soil, to forget the village church spire. Curiously enough poetry attaches only to objects that have come down to us, that have had long use. What is called progress, a vague and very doubtful term, rouses the lower parts of our intelligence. The higher parts vibrate the ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... sandstone raised in colossal blocks. The spire, floriated richly and graduated with a precise symmetry, rises to an extreme altitude of 220 feet 6 inches. The extreme length is about 170 ft. The massive oaken front doors are carved handsomely, and contain the arms of the Stewart ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... little wealth "to rearing phallic and Solophallic shrines over all the high places around him, and especially in front of Jerusalem, and on and around the Mount of Olives." On each side of the entrance to his celebrated temple, under the great phallic spire which formed the portico, were two handsome columns over fifty feet high, by the side of which were the sun God ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... and pleasant ones. From the south window, straight down the street, the houses and trees and the brown spire of the Methodist church stretched away—roofs and gable ends and the enormous tufty heads of the elm trees that half hung over them. At the back of these houses, the eye went uninterruptedly over meadows and fields to the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... From spire and barn looked westerly the patient weathercocks; But even the birches on the hill stood motionless as rocks. No sound was in the woodlands save the squirrel's dropping shell, And the yellow leaves among the boughs, ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... town was shelled, and the municipal offices and big buildings in the centre were utterly destroyed, but three buildings stand conspicuously among the ruins. These are two churches, and the Town Hall, with a spire resembling that of a church. The fact that the building next to the latter was leveled utterly, while not a single shell entered the supposed church, indicates that the Russian practice at 5,000 meters was sufficiently accurate to insure the protection of sacred edifices, ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring Finster-Aarhorn, the Todten See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags. Had I defined all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen's spire or the St. Gotthard. We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with especial willingness toward battle-fields. There man is most in earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions for ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... churches, being then in a state of decay. The present church, which is very solid, and has dignity of outline, was the work of Flitcroft, and was opened April 14, 1734. The steeple is 160 feet high, with a rustic pedestal, a Doric story, an octagonal tower, and spire. The basement is of rusticated Portland stone, of which the church is built, and quoins of the same material decorate the windows and angles within. It follows the lines of the period, with hardly any chancel, wide galleries on three sides standing on piers, from which columns rise to the ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... the world like some vast cathedral which taunts the soul with its aloofness. If, on some sunshiny afternoon you look up from the camp and see a ghost-moon hanging, no more than a foot above the highest spire, you must surely be "citified" if you do not pause to drink in its weird sublimity ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Madam. This shewes exlent in you; No pennance shall displease so you absolve me. Bid me to clime some Rock or Pyramide, Upon whose narrow spire you have advanc'd My peace, and I will reach it or else fall, Lost to the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... through it, and the song of birds in the trees; and beyond another distant wide-opened shutter they could see the roofs of village homes and the spire of the church which Monty felt he could so easily climb. There, all anxiety forgotten, they dreamed dreams and saw visions; and in each and all they were both to be good ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of the wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... anno reg. xxvij who sold his interest to Mr Copley for viijli xi s. ij d. {26} At the west end of the building is a large massy tower, lately put into thorough repair, this is surmounted by an octagonal spire, 230 feet in height, and formed of wooden shingles carefully fitted together. The great bell of this church is the largest in the county, and weighs nearly a ton and a half: the whole peal, consisting ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... the canyon widen suddenly into a gigantic amphitheater. In its very center, rising from a ragged granite pedestal, a pinnacle of rock, crowned by a tiny temple, shot into the air. It was three hundred feet, at least, from the stream bed to the summit of the spire—and what a colossal task it must have been to transport the building materials for the temple up the sheer sides of rock! The valley sinners must gain much merit from the danger and effort involved in climbing there ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... they—those iron men, Who braved the battle's storm of fire, When war's wild halo fill'd the glen, And lit each humble village spire; When hill sent back the sound to hill, When might was right, and ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my city? In the morning my city ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... eyes and looked about her. They were on the crest of a hill. The sun had set some time since, but the landscape was still clear in the mellow afterlight. To the west a dark church spire rose up against a marigold sky. Below was a little valley and beyond a long, gently-rising slope with snug farmsteads scattered along it. From one to another the child's eyes darted, eager and wistful. At last they ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Darwin objects, but not so strongly as he might. The tendril of this sort, on striking some fitting object, quickly curls round and firmly grasps it; then, after some hours, one side shortening or remaining short in proportion to the other, it coils into a spire, dragging the stem up to its support, and enabling the next tendril above to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... little disproportionate and even misleading in its version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions are gathered ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... there is a spire On which Sir Knight first bids the Squire The Fiddle, and its spoils, the case,[9] In manner of a trophy, place. That done, they ope the trapdoor gate, And let Crowdero down thereat; Crowdero making doleful face, Like hermit poor in pensive place. To ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... that was the cause of so much sorrow could never be found, and the Indians believe that it was taken away by the spirits of Kos-su'-kah and Tee-hee'-nay. In memory of them, and of this tragedy, the slender spire of rock [sometimes called "The Devil's Thumb"] that rises heavenward near the top of the cliff at this point is known among the Indians as Hum-mo', or ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... hill, and saw the spire of a steeple, and the skirts of a country town, which a passenger told us was about three ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... rough, scraggly yellow birch, on a bank of club-moss, so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining leaves—with here and there in the bordering a spire of false wintergreen strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of a May orchard—that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I recline to note what transpires. The sun is just past the meridian, and ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... man's height, and covered with such beautiful cement, that the whole pavement seemed to be but one single stone, most highly polished. A temple was erected in the middle of this terrace, having a spire rising about fifty cubits high from the building, which might be seen for several leagues round. The temple was thirty cubits long, and twenty broad; built of red marble, highly polished. The inside of the spire was adorned ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... generally found to be as effectual towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... changed his mind, for I got rather excited, and told the story in my topsy-turvy way, and his wife heard, and said so kindly, 'Take it, Thomas, and oblige the young lady. I'd do as much for our Jimmy any day if I had a spire ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... that never will make right good Malt; or if it is mown at a proper time, and if it be housed damp, or wettish, it will be apt to heat and mow-burn, and then it will never make so good Malt, because it will not spire, nor come so regularly on the floor as that which was ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous |
