-towers, and the sweet
changes of melodious, never-ceasing chimes. They carved their Lares
and Penates on their house-fronts very curiously, with sun-dials and
hatchments, sacred texts and legends of hospitality. The narrow streets
of Ghent, Louvain, Liege, Mechlin, Antwerp, Ypres, Bruges are thus full
of household memories and saintly traditions. So it is not strange that
a people whose daily hours were counted out with the music of belfries
were fond of fretting their towers with workmanship so precious and
delicate that it has been called "the petrifaction of music."

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