Many other miracles were attributed to the ashes and relics of the saint which lie in the beautiful shrine in St. Sebalduskirche.[54] We have spoken at length of this exquisite work of art (p. 208), to which, says Eobanus Hessus in his poem on Nuremberg, no words can do justice and with which not even the greatest artists of past ages could have found fault. "Musa nec ulla queat tanto satis esse labori Nec verbis æquare opus immortale futurum; Quod neque Praxiteles, nec Myron, nec Polycletus, Nemo Cares, nemo Scopas reprehendere posset." The east end of _St. Sebalduskirche_ faces the Rathaus: but the western is the oldest portion of it. Here the St. Peter's or Löffelholz Chapel, as it was called later, after the Nuremberg family of that name, with its crypt and choir (Engelschörlein), and the _lower_ part of the two towers[55] date from the beginning of the thirteenth century. They belong, in their original state, to the Romanesque style of architecture; whilst the nave affords a beautiful example of the transition to Gothic forms and the magnificent east choir is in the purest German Gothic. We may conjecture that the church was originally a basilica with a Romanesque east choir, flanked by two small adjoining aisles, corresponding to the west choir which is still preserved, and with a nave in the shape of a cross. Then, about 1309, they began to build broader and higher aisles in place of the low and narrow ones, and, in so doing, half concealed the old round-arched windows. But the most important alteration must have been when they pulled down the old east choir and began to build (1361) the Gothic choir, which together with the rest of the church has been recently and carefully restored. Twenty-two pillars 80 feet high support the vaulting. The two simple, slender towers at the west end, some 260 feet high, were apparently completed towards the end of the fifteenth century. According to tradition, the southernmost of these is built on piles--a tradition that reminds us of the swamps and marshes that once stood here, in the days when the narrow circumference of the first town wall did not cross if indeed it reached the river (see Ch. V.). In the base of each tower is a Romanesque doorway: over the southern one, in the tympanum, a high relief in stone represents the Trial of St. Helena. On the north side of the north tower is a low relief of the Crucifixion, a memorial to Burkhard Semler, 1463. Beneath the towers is the crypt in which was once the tomb of Konrad von Neumarkt, the founder of the Convent of St. Catherine. This, the oldest Nuremberg tomb, is now in the German Museum. The colossal bronze crucifix outside the west end, against the middle window of the St. Peter Chapel, was presented by the Starck family in 1482. It is attributed to H. Vischer, father of Peter Vischer, and has some merits as a work of art, though the figure is that of a Hercules rather than of a Christ.