trength of defence, and faithfulness of
watch, rather than splendor of aspect, its true expression is of just so
much diminution of weight upwards as may be necessary to its fully
balanced strength, not a jot more. There must be no light-headedness in
your noble tower: impregnable foundation, wrathful crest, with the vizor
down, and the dark vigilance seen through the clefts of it; not the
filigree crown or embroidered cap. No towers are so grand as the
square-browed ones, with massy cornices and rent battlements: next to
these come the fantastic towers, with their various forms of steep roof;
the best, not the cone, but the plain gable thrown very high; last of
all in my mind (of good towers), those with spires or crowns, though
these, of course, are fittest for ecclesiastical purposes, and capable
of the richest ornament. The paltry four or eight pinnacled things we
call towers in England (as in York Minster), are mere confectioner's
Gothic, and not worth classing.

Sec. XII. But, in all of them, this I believe to be a point of chief
necessity,--that they shall seem to stand, and shall verily stand, in
their own strength; not by help of buttresses nor artful balancings on
this side and on that. Your noble tower must need no help, must be
sustained by no crutches, must give place to no suspicion of
decrepitude. Its office may be to withstand war, look forth for tidings,
or to point to heaven: but it must have in its own walls the strength to
do this; it is to be itself a bulwark, not to be sustained by other
bulwarks; to rise and look forth, "the tower of Lebanon that looketh
toward Damascus," like a stern sentinel, not like a child held up in its
nurse's arms. A tower may, indeed, have a kind of buttress, a
projection, or subordinate tower at each of its angles; but these are to
its main body like the satellites to a shaft, joined with its strength,
and associated in its uprightness, part of the tower itself: exactly in
the proportion in which they lose their massive unity with its body and
assume the form of true buttress walls set on its angles, the tower
loses its dignity.

Sec. XIII. These two characters, then, are common to all noble towers,
however otherwise different in purpose or feature,--the first, that they
rise from massy foundation to lighter summits, frowning with battlements
perhaps, but yet evidently more pierced and thinner in wall than
beneath, and, in most ecclesiastical examples, divided into rich