04. 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.

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 ope