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. But it is worthy of note that at this period the purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men to the stars. "Gay religions, full of pomp and gold," could neither feel nor utter the grave tenderness of the early inspirations. And so, when the German monk affixed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Church, the spire had ceased to be an utterance of prayerful aspiration. It had lost its peculiar significance as an involuntary expression of worship, and had become liable to all the accidents and contingencies that attend the efforts of a merely human ambition. The whole story is an architectural version of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went down to the temple to pray. Of the finished spires, the loftiest in the world are, first, that of Strasburg Minster, 474 feet; second, that of St. Stephens at Vienna, 469 feet; third, that of Notre Dame at Antwerp, 466 feet; then that of Salisbury, 404 feet; Freiburg in the Breisgau, 380-1/2 feet; and then follow the distinguished heights of Landshut, Utrecht, Rouen, Chartres, Brugrels, Soissons, and others. 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.