But before we proceed to tell in how florid a manner the Low Countries interpreted the simpler forms of spires, we shall describe generically in what manner not only they, but all the other European kingdoms, were indebted to the old Rhineland towns for some of these forms. When the bell-tower, in about the seventh or eighth century, began to be used in Germany, it at once received certain very important modifications on the earlier Italian campanile. The upper terminations of these latter were horizontal, on account of their flat roofs. Now in more northern climates, where the snow falls, these flat roofs would be unsafe and inconvenient. So we find that the first church-towers that arose in such Rhenish places as Oberwesel, Gelnhausen, Bacharach, Coblentz, Cologne, Bingen, "sweet Bingen on the Rhine," no longer ended in these horizontal lines, but arose in pointed shapes. Indeed, the Germans, who were great rivals of the Italians in those days, not only in matters pertaining to architecture, but to literature also, in the same independent spirit which induced them alone, of all civilized peoples, to retain through all time the cramped, angular letters of monkish transcribers, in preference to the fair and square Roman forms, took particular pride in avoiding horizontal lines entirely at the tops of their towers, as they did at the tops of their letters. Wherever they so occur, they are insignificant,--rather ornamental than constructive. Not so with the English; they kept the square tops to their towers, and contented themselves with the pointed superstructure. Let us see how Teutonic stubbornness arranged the matter. Each separate face of their towers, whether these towers were square or octangular, ended above in a gable; and from these gables, in various ways, arose the octangular pointed roof or spire. This circumstance, more than any other, tended to give a peculiar character to German Gothic. The simplest type of the gabled spire was magnificently used in the spire of St. Peter's at Hamburg. This was the finest in North Germany; it was four hundred and sixteen feet high, and, if still standing, would be the third in height in the world. But it was destroyed by the great fire of 1842. Many a traveller can bear witness to the sweet melody of the chimes that used to sound beneath it every half-hour.