the _entasis_ of the Greek column. There are instances of this last treatment both in France and England. But it was not only in exuberance of enrichment and quaintness of form that these enthusiastic workmen uttered their inspirations. They built their spires to a most amazing height. Indeed, the loftiest steeples in the world arose in level tracts of country, where they could be seen at immense distances, as not only in Belgium and thereabout, but on the flat margins of the upper and lower Rhine, as at Strasburg and Cologne. In these countries, and about the North of France, there was a generous rivalry as to which city should lift up highest the cross of God. But as soon as the sacred passion for spire-building was corrupted by this new element of human emulation, some strange things happened. The people of Beauvais, for instance, desiring to beat the people of Amiens, set to work, we are told, to build a tower on their cathedral as high as they possibly could. The same thing had been done once before on the plains of Shinar. One foresees the result, of course; "it fell, for it was founded upon the sand, and great was the fall thereof." And so with the good people of Louvain. They built three spires to their cathedral, of which the central one reached the unparalleled height of five hundred and thirty-three feet, according to Hope, and the side-towers four hundred and thirty feet. This tremendous group, however, fell, or, threatening destruction, was taken down, in 1604. We remember what the Wanderer said so finely in the "Excursion":-- "We must needs confess That 'tis a thing impossible to frame Conceptions equal to the soul's desire; And the most difficult of tasks _to keep_ Heights which the soul is competent to gain." But we find that ecclesiastical edifices were not the only ones which were adorned with this high building; for town-halls were not infrequently distinguished by immensely lofty spires, as at Brussels. It is curious to see, however, how easily the less exalted impulses which erected them may be discovered. They do not _soar_, they _climb_ up panting into the sky, like the famous passage up through Chaos, in Milton, "with difficulty and labor hard." They have not the light, airy gliding upward of the religious spire, whose feeling George Herbert had in his mind, when he sang of prayer:-- "Of what an easy, quick accesse, My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly May our requests thine eare invade!" Not so; but it is all human rivalry, a succession of diminishing towers, steps piled one above another, where the mind every now and then may stop to breathe, and then fight its way onward again;--not an Ascension, like that from Bethany; rather the toil of a very human, though very laudable ambition.