Delft is a thing by itself in Europe, and all these
truths can be said of it by a man who sees it for the first time: first,
that its enormous height is drawn up, as it were, and enhanced by every
chance stroke that the instinct of its slow builders lit upon; for
these men of the infinite flats love the contrast of such pinnacles, and
they have made in the labour of about a thousand years a landscape of
their own by building, just as they have made by ceaseless labour a rich
pasture and home out of those solitary marshes of the delta.

Secondly, that height is inhanced by something which you will not see,
save in the low countries between the hills of Ardennes and the yellow
seas--I mean brick Gothic; for the Gothic which you and I know is built
up of stone, and, even so, produces every effect of depth and distance;
but the Gothic of the Netherlands is often built curiously of bricks,
and the bricks are so thin that it needs a whole host of them in an
infinity of fine lines to cover a hundred feet of wall. They fill the
blank spaces with their repeated detail; they make the style (which even
in stone is full of chances and particular corners) most intricate,
and--if one may use so exaggerated a metaphor--"populous." Above all,
they lead the eye up and up, making a comparison and measure of their
tiny bands until the domination of a buttress or a tower is exaggerated
to the enormous. Now the belfry of Delft, though all the upper part is
of stone, yet it stands on a great pedestal (as it were) of brick--a
pedestal higher than the houses, and in this base are pierced two
towering, broad, and single ogives, empty and wonderful and full of that
untragic sadness which you may find also in the drooping and wide eyes
of extreme old age.

Thirdly, the very structure of the thing is bells. Here the bells are
more than the soul of a Christian spire; they are its body too, its
whole self. An army of them fills up all the space between the delicate
supports and framework of the upper parts; for I know not how many feet,
in order, diminishing in actual size and in the perspective also of that
triumphant elevation, stand ranks on ranks of bells from the solemn to
the wild, from the large to the small; a hundred or two hundred or a
thousand. There is here the prodigality of Brabant and Hainaut and the
Batavian blood, a generosity and a productivity in bells without stint,
the man who designed it saying: "Since we are to have bells, le