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More "Spire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... top storey octagonal. The principal modern restorations are the upper part of the north-west tower, which copies the Early English work of that on the south-west; and the fine central tower and spire, which had been erected at different periods in the 14th century, but collapsed, doing little damage to the fabric, in 1861. Under the direction of Sir Gilbert Scott and others they were reconstructed with scrupulous care in preserving the original plan. The Lady chapel at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the faces were new and strange; New figures sat in the oaken stalls, New voices chaunted in the choir, Yet the place was the same place, The same dusky walls Of cold, gray stone, The same cloisters and belfry and spire. ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... heavens above it bowed; The sun was radiant, large, and glowing; And, see, a minister's structure proud Stood in the rich light, golden showing. The clouds around it, sunny-clear, Seemed bearing it aloft like pinions; Its spire-point seemed to disappear, Slow vanishing ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... more leisurely fashion. Across the river, a quarter of a mile above the point at which they were lying, stretched London Bridge, with its narrow arches and the houses projecting beyond it on their supports of stout timbers. Beyond, on the right, rising high above the crowded roofs, was the lofty spire of St. Paul's. The boys were almost awed by this vast assemblage of buildings. That London was a great city they had known, but they were not prepared for so immense a difference between it and the place where they had lived all their lives. Only with the Tower were they somewhat disappointed. ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... Hocheim, Frankfort, and made an excursion to Hanau, then to Mayence, and another excursion to Rudesheim, and Johansberg; then by Oppenheim, Worms, and Manheim, making an excursion to Heidelberg, then by Spire, Carlsruhe, Rastadt, and Kelh, to Sfrasburg, where I arrived April the 16th, and proceeded again on the 18th, by Phalsbourg, Fenestrange, Dieuze, Moyenvie, Nancy, Toul, Ligny, Barleduc, St. Diziers, Vitry, Chalons sur Marne, Epernay, Chateau Thierri, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... mareschal de Noailles to assemble sixty thousand men upon the Maine; while Coigny was sent into Alsace with a numerous army to defend that province, and oppose prince Charles should he attempt to pass the Rhine. The mareschal de Noailles, having secured the towns of Spire, Worms, and Oppenheim, passed the Rhine in the beginning of June, and posted himself on the east side of that river, above Franckfort. The earl of Stair advanced towards him, and encamped at Killen-bach, between the river Maine and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... cathedral platform upon the valley of the Arno, spread like a glowing picture at your feet, and see how immediately it resolves the doubt. Not, indeed, the valley of the Arno as it stands at present, thick set with tower and spire and palace. In order to arrive at the raison d'etre of Fiesole you must blot out mentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... moment. Presently, from the top of the hill, they looked down upon the long line of little homes lying along the banks of the river like peaceful watchmen in a pleasant land, with corn and wine and oil at hand. The tall cross on the spire of the Parish Church was itself a message of hope. He did not define it so; but the impression vaguely, perhaps superstitiously, possessed him. It was this vague influence, perhaps (for he was not a Catholic), which made him involuntarily lift his hat, as did Nicolas, when they passed a calvary; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... matter how much she strive to 'spire, Sis' Nannie Goat's measured 'g'inst some'h'n' higher; "First cousin to a sheep" an' "de po' man's cow," Is hol'-down luck, come when, come how. An' she ain't by 'erself helt down like dat— No, she ain't by ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... their wings; while beyond rose a range of smooth downs, the intermediate space being sprinkled over with neat farmhouses and labourers' cottages; and rising above the trees appeared the grey, ivy-covered tower of the parish church, with the taper spire pointing upwards to the clear blue sky—not more clear or bright, though, than his Mary's eyes; so True Blue thought, whether he said it ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... been erected as part of the original plan, and also that a new upper part was being added to this same tower about the middle of the thirteenth century. This new portion eventually rose above the roofs to the level of the top of the square parapet, about the base of the octagonal spire, the spire being a still later addition. Now the heightening of this tower—perhaps with already the idea of a future spire in view—would raise many questions. Experience would already have taught the builders that the early central towers of many other churches were incapable of carrying their ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... at first to become merely a little wart of pulp, which finds expression in skill and quickness and more of coveted leisure. There is the next higher terrace and another and another, until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the purest intellects are elevated to an ever increasing height in ever decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling base below they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude of incarnate genius burning like suns ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... stands on the main street, with its tall spire and its two tiers of gray-blinded windows. Beside it is the mossy burial-ground, where prim old ladies walk on Sunday afternoons, with sprigs ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... gloves and tools, and went away, tugging her basket of weeds. Elliott, left behind, surveyed the borders critically. To cut without letting it appear that she had cut was evidently what Aunt Jessica wanted. She reached in and snipped off a spire of larkspur from the very back of the border, then stood back to see what had happened. No, if one hadn't known the stalk had been there, one wouldn't now know it was gone. The thing could be done, then. Cautiously she selected a head of white phlox. The result of that ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... it abroad, first thick, and afterwards thinner and thinner upon the said floor (as it combeth), and there it lieth (with turning every day four or five times) by the space of one and twenty days at the least, the workmen not suffering it in any wise to take any heat, whereby the bud end should spire, that bringeth forth the blade, and by which oversight or hurt of the stuff itself the malt would be spoiled and turn small commodity to the brewer. When it hath gone, or been turned, so long upon the floor, they carry it to a kiln covered with hair cloth, where they give it gentle heats (after ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Madam, had you scene with what a vehemency He did blaspheme the gods, Like to a man pearcht on some lofty Spire Amazed which way to relieve himselfe, You would have stood, as ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... gentry had something to do with it. They travelled about too much to be good men. Small though Thrums used to be, it had four kirks in all before the disruption, and then another, which split into two immediately afterward. The spire of the parish church, known as the auld kirk, commands a view of the square, from which the entrance to the kirk-yard would be visible, if it were not hidden by the town-house. The kirk-yard has long been crammed, and is not now in ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... as the train whirled rapidly through the scarcely-awakened country, and she had seen the soft and beautiful landscapes of the South lit up by the early sunlight. How the bright little villages shone, with here and there a gilt weathercock glittering on the spire of some small gray church, while as yet in many valleys a pale gray mist lay along the bed of the level streams or clung to the dense woods on the upland heights! Which was the more beautiful—the sharp, clear picture, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... the husks prick thy gums, but there is no other meat. Well may the hearers' ears go aching; for thy cry, man, proceedeth from thy aching belly. But now I will set the song again, and tell thee of a lady girdled with fine gold. Beneath the girdle beats a red heart; but her spirit is like a spire of blue smoke, that comes from a fire, indeed, but strains up to heaven. Warmed by that fire, like that smoke I fly up; and so I lie ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... fastened on the chief bowman's steel-shod pole, held high—there is silence but for the bells—the bowman's pole is lowered—as with one stroke out sweep the paddles in a poetry of motion. The chimes die away over the water, the chapel spire gleams—it, too, is gone. Some one strikes up a plaintive ditty,—the voyageur's song of the lost lady and the faded roses, or the dying farewell of Cadieux, the hunter, to his comrades,—and the adventurers are launched ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... made terror and victory the order of the day; and generals Brunswick and Wurmser were very soon driven from Haguenau on the lines of the Lauter, and not being able even to maintain that position, passed the Rhine at Philipsburg. Spire and Worms were retaken. The republican troops, everywhere victorious, occupied Belgium, that part of Holland situated on the left of the Meuse, and all the towns on the Rhine, except Mayence and Mannheim, ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... the death of a tree that intercepted the view of the bridge, for which, too, I have drawn a white rail, and shall be absolute travelling Jupiter at Baucis and Philemon's; for I have persuaded him to transform a cottage into a church, by exalting a spire upon the end of it, as Talbot has done. By the way, I have dined at the Vineyard.(59) I dare not trust you with what I think, but I was a little disappointed. To-morrow we go to the ruins of the Abbey of St. Osyth; it is the seat of the Rochfords, but I never chose to go ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village. Jean Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D—— A path which intersected the plain passed a few paces ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... brothers grew fat, Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl, Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul. But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire, And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary, Where only the wind sings miserere. Of what the monks came by no legend runs, At least they were lucky in not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... an hour after dawn when his father aroused him. The boat lay moored by a little quay, beyond which his eye travelled to clusters of red roofs glowing in the easterly sunshine, and a dominant spire, the weathercock of which dazzled the eye with its brightness. The town was just waking up, as could be perceived from the blue wreaths of smoke that poured out of ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the interior ... are founded on no higher authority than an interpolation by a missionary translator into the Chinese text of the treaty between France and China." That "the disturbance of a local fengshui by a church spire is considered as much of a grievance as the erection of a hideous tannery beside Westminster Abbey ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... amounted to about 7,500 men; and at Done they were to meet M. Bonchamps and M. de Lescure, who, it was supposed, would bring with them as many more. They marched out of Vihiers early on the Tuesday morning, having remained there only about a couple of hours, and before nightfall they saw the spire of Doue church. They then rested, intending to force their way into the town early on the following morning; but they had barely commenced their preparations for the evening, when a party of royalists came out to them from the town, inviting them in. M. de Lescure ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... district where the clever and painstaking French agriculturist gets every grain out of the soil, a district where we could see the spire of a parish church every six miles, the land of a people, sturdy, devout, tenacious and ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... rich, level pastures of the Vale of Pickering, the town has a picturesque and pleasant site. At the top of the market-place where the ground becomes much steeper stands the church, its grey bulk dominating every view. From all over the Vale one can see the tall spire, and from due east or west it has a surprising way of peeping over the hill tops. It has even been suggested that the tower and spire have been a landmark for a very long time, owing to the fact that where the hills and formation of the ground do not obstruct the view, or make road-making ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... the church at Ormskirk, having two steeples, a tower and spire, contiguous to each other, is briefly glanced at in the tradition. This circumstance, according to some accounts, was occasioned by the removal of part of the bells from Burscough at the dissolution of the monasteries, when the existing spire steeple was found to be not sufficiently ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... fro, saw surgeons passing up, or men coming down carrying a stretcher, where lay a long white figure whose face was shrouded, and whose fight was done. Sometimes I stopped to watch the passers in the street, the moonlight shining on the spire opposite, or the gleam of some vessel floating, like a white-winged sea-gull, down the broad Potomac, whose fullest flow can never wash away the red ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... purpose of saving me. One of these was M. Frotte, who, as the pupil of my physician Dessault, was allowed free ingress and egress to the Temple. One day he entered my cell, motioned me to be silent, seized me, and dragged me to a cabinet under the spire of the tower. A sick child who had been given over by the faculty was substituted in my place, and he, dying two days after (8th June 1795), was buried as Louis XVII. At my supposed death, there being ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... buttresses and flying buttresses and all the rest of it so as to keep them from falling. Look at those," he added, pointing at the skyscrapers before him, "they're not afraid to stand by themselves; they mean something, they have a use, while a spire just sticks straight up, pointing at nothing and being of no service unless it is to hang bells in a belfry. I don't care what people say about those crazy old tumble-down buildings of the Middle Ages, they may be beautiful and all that, but they're ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... had not come true, thus far. There were no roses blooming on Archie's cheeks yet; and sometimes, when Lilias watched his pale face, as he sat gazing out into the mist, she was painfully reminded of the time when he used to watch the shadow of the spire coming slowly round to the yew-tree by the ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... and the Mississippi eastward, and southward to the Gulf, the Tubercled or Small Pale Green Orchis (H. flava) lifts a spire of inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers, more attractive to the eye of the structural botanist than to the aesthete. It blooms in moist places, as most orchids do, since water with which to manufacture nectar enough to fill their deep spurs is a prime necessity. Orchids have arrived ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... certainly superior to any church I had hitherto seen in Switzerland. Its architecture exhibits various specimens of Gothic: there are many windows of painted glass in good preservation, and also several handsome monuments. The choir is handsome, and its pillars are of black marble. Its spire rises to a great height, and from the church-yard there is a fine prospect of the lake, and the surrounding country, with which I should have been more delighted, had I not so recently seen the still grander scene which Vevay commands. The population of Lausanne is computed at 8,000, and they ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... right and left. Once more the car began to move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain; and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the mist, and one smooth shoulder of ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... pretty department of the subject which I might call grace swearing. 'Od's fish,' cried the king, when he saw the man climbing Salisbury spire; 'he shall have a patent for it—no one else shall do it.' One might call such little things Wardour Street curses. 'Od's bodkins' is a ladylike form, and 'Od's possles' a variety I met in the British Museum. Every gentleman once upon a time aspired to have his own particular grace curse, just ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the sky—the dunes, the spire of the cathedral, the roof of the mairie—it became vague, shadowy—the ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to courage firm and high! Health to Granta's chivalry! Wisely finding, day by day, Play in toil, and toil in play. Granta greets them, gliding down On by park and spire and town; Humming mills and golden meadows, Barred with elm and poplar shadows; Giant groves, and learned halls; Holy fanes and pictured walls. Yet she bides not here; around Lies the Muses' sacred ground. Most she lingers, where below ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... snail is of a brightly shining yellowish or greenish horn colour. The whorls of its spire are small, but the body whorl, whilst preserving a wide diameter throughout, gradually increases in trumpet-like manner to the round mouth. It belongs to the same group with H. olivetorum and H. nitida, and is allied to the Australian H. ptycomphala. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... representing artists of every period, poets. musicians, painters and sculptors. In the centre of the basement sits the colossal bronze-gilt figure of Prince Albert. The canopy terminates at the top in a Gothic spire, rising in three stages and surmounted by a cross. The monument is one hundred and seventy-five feet high, and gorgeously embellished with bronze and marble statues, gildings, colored ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... top of a steep hill Mary looked back to see if Chicopee were yet, visible, but nothing was to be seen except the spire of the Unitarian Meeting-House. About a quarter of a mile to the west, however, the graveyard was plainly discernible, and she looked until her eyes were dim with tears at the spot where she knew her parents and brother were lying. By this time ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... prologue to The Golden Legend, we have the attempt of Lucifer and the Powers of the Air to tear down the cross from the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral, with the remonstrance of ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... here. Eastminster is over there——" again she pointed. "On fine days you can see the spire of the cathedral, but not from here—from a point about two miles further across Bessmoor. If you are staying some time you ought ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... anything but peace and pleasant life in the surroundings. But these black-clad women do know—know that the cool green clump of trees over on the hill-side hides a roofless ruin with fire-blackened walls; that the church spire that for all their lives they had seen out there over the sky-line is no longer visible because it lies shell-smitten to a tumbled heap of brick and stone and mortar; that the glint of white wood and spot of scarlet yonder in the ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... all was prosperity and riches, healthfully distributed. Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire, and intermixed with frequent heaps of verdure, where trees threw up their shade from unseen trunks. Beyond was the bay and its islands, almost the only objects, in a country unmarked by strong natural features, on which time and human toil ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... grateful to the smell; while the eyesight was soothed by reposing on the smooth sward of a bowling-green spread out immediately before it, or in dwelling upon gently undulating meads, terminating, at about a mile's distance, in the woody, spire-crowned ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of mind they, like the pagans of ancient Rome, charge them with horrible crimes, and seize the slightest occasion for murderous attack. A church [Page 262] spire is said to disturb the good luck of a neighbourhood—the people burn the building. A rumour is started that babies in a foundling hospital have their eyes taken out to make into photographic medicine—the hospital is demolished and the Sisters of Charity killed. A skeleton ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Plassans was the steeple of St. Mark, rising like a stony needle against the blue sky. To and fro he slowly paced the court with a row of fellow-students; and each time he faced the wall he eyed that spire which to him represented the whole town, the whole earth spread beneath the scudding clouds. Noisy groups waxed hot in disputation round the plane-trees; friends would pair off in the corners under the spying glance of some ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... and higher, The branches blow and I see a spire, The gleam of a turret, the glint of a dome, All sparkling and bright, like white ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... good a right to their churches as we have to ours and that the Huns had no kind of business to destroy them. Just think, Mrs. Dr. dear," concluded Susan pathetically, "how we would feel if a German shell knocked down the spire of our church here in the glen, and I'm sure it is every bit as bad to think of Rangs cathedral being ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... her companion moodily, and with no show of interest. 'Very like.' His eyes wandered from the thatched roof of the cottage to where, high above the tall old yew-trees, a slender spire ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... upspringing, fantastic German architecture, in which every shaft, arch, vault-girdle, pillar, window-frame, pinnacle, seems struggling and panting upward with an almost audible eloquence. This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect of the ancient basilica—the Roman business-hall, compounded of Greek elements, and transformed into a Grecian temple—is ever at work repressing that devotional ecstasy which is the characteristic of the Gothic church. The Italian language ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... grey city wrapped in its veil of smoke, the tall spire of the old church rising in picturesque isolation above the line of the surrounding buildings. It seemed at that moment to stand as a symbol of the life of the Mother Country, a life fenced in by convention, by forms and ceremonies sanctified to every Englishman by centuries ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... houses, over the windings of the Nidda. Walter could hear the tinkle tinkle of sheep bells below, or was it possible that he could already hear the bells of fairyland ringing? Over the church spire of a little village they soared, and all the children shouted: "Zeppelin! Zeppelin!" because you see all this happened in modern times, when even the children no longer believe in ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... lovely and romantic against the distant spire of Hillport Church, and its effect on the couple was just what ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... eye, of all castles which I had seen, the most elevated in its situation, and the most difficult of access. The clouds of heaven seemed to be resting upon its battlements. But what do I see yonder? "Is it the top of the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral?" "It is, Sir," replied the postilion. I pulled off my travelling cap, by way of doing homage; and as I looked at my watch, to know the precise time, found it was just ten o'clock. It was worth making a minute of. Yet, owing to the hills before—or rather to ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... against its obstructing current. No scheme of colonisation has ever been designed or thought of by them; for it is only near its source, as we have seen, that settlements exist. In the Chaco no white man's town ever stood upon its banks, nor church spire flung shadow athwart ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... just coming into sight must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... air on the edge of the rock, and the trees on the long esplanade in front of the Admiralty, were all similarly coated, every twig rising as rigid as iron in the dark air. Only the huge golden hemisphere of the Cathedral dome, and the tall, pointed golden spire of the Admiralty, rose above the gloom, and half shone with a muffled, sullen glare. A few people, swaddled from head to foot, passed rapidly to and fro, or a droschky, drawn by a frosted horse, sped away to the entrance of the Nevskoi Prospekt. Even these appeared ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... temple bell" is the coinage of popular speech. Many of the inscriptions, though with less of sunny hope and joy than even Christian grave-stones bear, are yet mournfully beautiful.[33] They preach Buddhism in its reality. Whereas, the general associations of the Christian spire and belfry, apart from the note of time, are those of joy, invitation and good news, those of the tongueless and log-struck bells of Buddhism are sombre and saddening. "As merry as a marriage bell," could never be said of the boom ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... sword in his hand and his gold and silver treasures about him. There is a grey old castle upon the top of that mighty mound; and yonder, rising three hundred feet above the soil, from among those noble forest trees, behold that old Norman master-work, that cloud encircled cathedral spire, around which a garrulous army of rooks and choughs continually wheel their flight. Now, who can wonder that the children of that fine old city are proud of her, and offer up prayers for her prosperity? I, myself, who was not born within her walls, offer up prayers ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... condemn it, but in one plain brief word He never comes to Sunday morning chapel. Methinks he teacheth in some Sunday-school, Feeding the poor and starveling intellect With wholesome knowledge, or on the Sabbath morn He loves the country and the neighbouring spire Of Madingley or Coton, or perchance Amid some humble poor he spends the day, Conversing with them, learning all their cares, Comforting them and easing ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... take it, and told him why I was in such a hurry. It was silly, I dare say, but it changed his mind, for I got rather excited, and told the story in my topsy-turvy way, and his wife heard, and said so kindly, 'Take it, Thomas, and oblige the young lady. I'd do as much for our Jimmy any day if I had a spire of ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... kings in stony state, As if with breath and human soul expand. Well may'st thou be astounded—view it well; Go not from hence before thou see thy fill, And learn the builder's virtues and his name. Of this tall spire in every country tell, And with thy tale the lazy rich men shame; Show how the glorious Canning did excel; How he, good man, a friend for kings became, And glorious paved at once the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the cathedral. He also constructed the spiral staircase leading to the roof through an elegant Gothic turret, where the medallion portrait of Omodeo may be seen. It has since been proved that the cupola of Omodeo was solid enough, for it has sustained the spire which was put upon it in 1772; but he was tormented concerning it in many ways, and died ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... near the Hotel de Ville, dropped something that spit fire and sparks. Everybody in the neighbourhood let out a yell and rushed for cover in the firm belief that it was another bomb such as was dropped in Namur. It dropped, spitting fire until fairly near the spire of the Hotel de Ville, when it burst into ten or a dozen lights like a Roman candle—evidently a signal to the troops still outside the city—perhaps to tell them that the occupation had been peacefully accomplished. We learned afterward that ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... the amber mist, That softly wreathes each mountain-spire, The sky its clustered columns kissed, And touched their snow with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... It was at Wellington College that he was born, in the Master's Lodge, in a sunny bedroom, in the south-east corner of the house; one of its windows looking to the south front of the college and the chapel with its slender spire; the other window looking over the garden and a waste of heather beyond, to the fir-crowned hill of Ambarrow. My father had been Headmaster for twelve years and was nearing the end of his time there; and I was myself ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... orders. It was afterward argued that these noises came from an explosion of meteors, a shower of these missiles being then in progress, invisible, of course, in the day-time. Just after the signing of the Declaration of Independence the royal arms on the spire of the Episcopal church at Hampton, Virginia, were struck off by lightning. Shortly before the surrender of Cornwallis a display of northern lights was seen in New England, the rays taking the form of cannon, facing southward. In Connecticut ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... be placed in alcohol. The outer shell, when it is spiral, should be broken at the upper part, and at several points of the spire, to let the liquor run in, so that the whole animal may be preserved; it is possible, following this indication, to have shell-fish in such order, that they may be dissected, even after being a very long time ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... the barbacues for several weeks, without the slightest advance in curing; and, unless it be frequently turned while in this wet state, it is sure to germinate; the berries first swell, then a thin white spire issues from the seam, and on opening the berry the young leaves will be actually seen formed inside, so rapid is ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... river winds round the bases of rocky hills, a river like our own Wye or Tees in their loveliest reaches; level meadows stretch away on its opposite side; mounds set with slender-stemmed foliage occupy the nearer ground, a small village with its simple spire peeps from the forest at the bend of the valley, and it is remarkable that in architecture thus employed neither Perugino nor any other of the ideal painters ever use Italian forms but always Transalpine, both of church and castle. The little landscape which forms the background of his own ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... would crawl out every night to and sometimes into the enemy lines and on their return report what they had heard. By day, aviators came back from flights over enemy positions and gave details of what they had seen. Every hill, tree-top, church spire, tall building and captive balloon watched every move of the enemy and reported it. These reports by the ears and eyes of the armies enabled American and allied commanders to plan their infantry ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... slowly to the village of Ecclefechan, the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which clothe a hill beyond. I soon enter the main street of the village, which in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the center of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... see now, on the water-side, is the viceroy's palace; that to the right again, is the convent of the barefooted Carmelites; yon lofty spire is the cathedral of St. Catherine; and that beautiful and light piece of architecture is the church of our Lady of Pity. You observe there a building with a dome, rising behind the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... lights in the windows; a blue spire of smoke Climbs from the grange grove of elm and oak. The smell of the Earth, where the night pours to her Its dewy libation, is sweeter than myrrh, And an incense to Toil is the smell of the loam On the ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... was thinking that the next time he came to the station would probably be at the end of term, when his schoolboy days would be over. He leaned against a gate, and looked long at the green quiet hill, with its tall spire and embosoming trees, till ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... he embarked again in the very same nut-shell of a boat that he had left Egypt in, passed right under the bows of the English vessels, and set foot once more in France. France acknowledged him; the sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; and all the people cried, "Long ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... oarsmen, all plying their arms in unison, so that the vessel looked like some brilliant many-limbed creature treading the water. Presently appeared the heavy walls inclosing the City itself, dominated by the tall openwork timber spire of St. Paul's, with the foursquare, four-turreted Tower acting, as it has been well said, as a padlock to a chain, and the river's breadth spanned by London bridge, a very street of houses built on the abutments. Now, Bankside had houses on each side of the road, and Wry-mouthed Tibble showed ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ago, when I was first made boatswain of a corvette (during this conversation he was looking through the telescope); yes, there it is," said he; "I have it in the field. Look, Mr Simple, do you see a small church, with a spire of glazed tiles, shining ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... be refused. Ascend to the top of this spire by this outer stair, and throw yourself down from it without hesitation. When you are at the earth, though you were in a thousand pieces, with one word I will set you upon your feet, straighter and with a better carriage than ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... all, might be planted in Warwickshire, and no tourist would know that it was not indigenous there. They call their local stream the Avon, and boating there some idle summer days, I easily dreamed myself at home again, and within bow-shot of the skyward-pointing spire which covers the bones of Shakespeare. It is, I believe, a fact that the stream is christened after another river than that which owes its glamour to the poet's name, but in a case of this kind mere fact matters little, and the inhabitants themselves are, for ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... as we had hitherto seen it, grey under a leaden sky, but bright and blue in the sunshine; Banff on the left of the bay; the River Doveran almost lost amid banks of shingle, where it enters the sea; a white and tolerably high shore extending eastwards; a kirk, with a high spire which serves as a sea-mark; and, on the point, about a mile to the east, the town of Macduff. At Banff, we at once went to the pier, about half finished, on which 15,000L. will be expended, to the great benefit of this clean, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... builders of west Oxfordshire experimented in cruciform planning. The division between chancel and nave is felt much less at Witney than in the other two churches; for the great thirteenth century tower and spire, resting upon massive piers joined by pointed arches, throw a considerable portion of their weight upon nave and transept arcades, whose exceptional massiveness gives unity to the whole design. In the fifteenth century, however, the rebuilders of the aisleless church of Minster Lovell, ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... staircase skylight was blown away, and the lead which surrounded it rolled up as neatly as if just out of the plumber's: roofs were torn off and cabins blown down.] Have any trees been blown away? Has the spire stood? Is Madgy Woods alive? How many roofs of houses in the town have been blown away, and how many hundred slates and panes of glass must be replaced? The glass dome over the staircase at Ardbraccan has been blown away; two of the saloon windows blown in. ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... protruding at the angles. There was no great originality of design, merely the delightful picturesqueness which unstripped logs never fail to yield. She knew that every detail of the building was to be carried out in the same way. The roof, the spire, the porches, even the fence which was ultimately to ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lump, of any regular shape, which has a very small, sharp, high pinnacle in the centre, the height above water can easily be equal to the depth below. An authentic case on record is that of a berg grounded in the Strait of Belle Isle, in sixteen fathoms of water, that had a thin spire about one hundred ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... critics said, and a new scene which in these days is much to be desired. The manner in which Lacroix had arranged to show both the exterior and interior of the church was a clever hit, every one agreed. Outside, with the clear blue sky for background, the spire of the church was clearly defined, and on a niche just above the main doorway stood an exquisitely carved statue of the patron St. Anne, holding by the hand her little daughter, the Blessed Virgin. And beyond ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... the wonderfully complex jaws and legs of crustaceans. It is familiar to almost every one, that in a flower the relative position of the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, as well as their intimate structure, are intelligible on the view that they consist of metamorphosed leaves, arranged in a spire. In monstrous plants, we often get direct evidence of the possibility of one organ being transformed into another; and we can actually see, during the early or embryonic stages of development in flowers, as well as in crustaceans and many other animals, that organs, which when mature ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... raise vertical OP, and then from P draw sloping lines to each corner of base a, b, &c., and by means of central lines drawn from P to half base, find the points where the gable roofs intersect the central spire or pyramid. Any other proportions can be obtained by adding to ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... most lonely and forlorn of all sad places—by their broken and fallen headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves, and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Jane, to Fred and Frank, To Theodore and Mary, To Willie and to Reginald, To Louis, Sue and Gary; To sturdy boys and merry girls, And all the dear young people Who live in towns, or live on farms, Or dwell near spire or steeple; To boys who work, and boys who play, Eager, alert and ready, To girls who meet each happy day With faces sweet and steady; To dearest comrades, one and all, To Harry, Florrie, Kate, To children small, and children ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... half-height with a crown of thorns. The different sides of the Chapelle are in the same style—with buttresses between the windows, gables surmounting these, and a fine open parapet crowning all. The roof is sloping, and the height is over a hundred feet. The spire measures, from the vaulting, seventy feet. We entered by a stair-case the upper chapel, and an exquisite view presented itself. A single apartment, a half-circular chair, with fine, large windows, detached columns with bases and capitals, and fine groining—these all ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... white Cape Hyacinth, or Spire Lily. A hardy, summer-flowering, bulbous plant 3 ft. to 4 ft. in height, gracefully surmounted with from twenty to fifty pendent, bell-shaped snow-white flowers. Thrives in any position and equally suitable for ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... the master (the salary is four hundred pounds a year), the school flourishes, and must prove one of the greatest advantages to the country of anything that could have been established. This edifice entirely at the Primate's expense. The church is erected of white stone, and having a tall spire makes a very agreeable object in a country where churches and spires do not abound—at least, such as are worth looking at. Three other churches the Primate has also built, and done considerable reparations to ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... for the distant sea. The roar of London is the roar of ire The lion utters in his old desire For Libya out of dim captivity. The long bright silver of Cheapside I see, Her gilded weathercocks on roof and spire Exulting eastward in the western fire; All things recall one ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... The graceful spire rose before them, guiding them all the way, which did not seem long to Olive, who revelled in the beauties unfolded along their lonely walk—a winding road, bounding the forest, on whose verge the hill stood. But Christal's Parisian feet soon grew wearied, and when they came ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... wield, And strike proud Haco from his car, While all around the shadowy kings Denmark's grim ravens cowered their wings. 'Tis said, that, in that awful night, Remoter visions met his sight, Foreshowing future conquests far, When our son's sons wage northern war; A royal city, tower and spire, Reddened the midnight sky with fire, And shouting crews her navy bore, Triumphant to the victor shore. Such signs may learned clerks explain - They pass ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... last, why the Kafirs hated to go about the land after dark, averring that the afflicted bushes threatened and chased them. She began herself to experience an inexplicable feeling of relief, as though at the overcoming of an enemy, when a great spire of smoke betokened the final uprooting and burning of a clump of bush. For fire was the ultimate element used to transform the pest from a malignant into a beneficent factor, and, as aromatic ash, it became of service to the land it had ruined so long. Almost, the process seemed an ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... themselves. Some of them have been men once: perhaps one retains his sculling skill, and is occasionally engaged by a gentleman to give him lessons. They regarded me eagerly—they "spotted" a Thames freshman who might be made to yield silver; but I walked away down the road into the village. The spire of the church interested me, being of shingles—i.e. of wooden slates—as the houses are roofed in America, as houses were roofed in Elizabethan England; for Young America reproduces Old England ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... a large room, with a wide window looking on to the garden and away across meadows and cornfields to Harrow Hill with its thin church spire. The window was guarded with iron bars. The wall-paper was designed in little circles; and in each circle there were figures of little boys and girls, absurd and gay. So many hundreds of little figures, and so absurd and gay, that to sit in that room surrounded by them, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the Old Empire are in Quebec to-day. Quebec is French to the core, not in loyalty to republican France, but in loyalty to the religious ideals which the founders brought to the banks of the St. Lawrence three centuries ago. Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of Quebec. From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New Hampshire, you can follow the thread of every river in Quebec by ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... looked down he saw a beautiful country, a fertile land upon which man had worked for two thousand years, too beautiful to be trodden to pieces by armies. He saw the cultivated fields, varying in color like a checker board, and the neat villages with trees about them. Here and there the spire of a church rose high above everything. Churches and wars ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sombre hue, but in reality the waters are clear as crystal. Beyond these groves, still looking south, you discover the woods about Wardour Castle, and amongst them the silvery gleam of another sheet of water. To the south-west is the giant spire of Salisbury, which since the fall of Fonthill Tower now reigns in solitary stateliness over these vast regions of down and desert. Stourton Tower presents itself to the north, whilst to the west, in the extreme distance, several high hills are traced which have ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... beautiful landscape; and finding the captain, a noble-hearted sailor, inquired of him how long it would take us to reach the port of New York. "That is New York," said he, pointing to a dark mass of buildings, with here and there a spire towering in the air. "We shall reach there about eight o'clock; but it is Sunday, and you will have to stay on board till to-morrow." With this he turned away, calling his men to weigh anchor; as the physician, whose duty it was ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... arrow that was the cause of so much sorrow could never be found, and the Indians believe that it was taken away by the spirits of Kos-su'-kah and Tee-hee'-nay. In memory of them, and of this tragedy, the slender spire of rock [sometimes called "The Devil's Thumb"] that rises heavenward near the top of the cliff at this point is known among the Indians as ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... all the time the great brown eyes, which looked as if they had seen celestial things, scanned the sky, saw the tall cedars of Lebanon, the flocks on the slopes across the valley, the scattered stone cottages, the fleecy clouds that faintly flecked the deep blue of the sky, the distant spire of a church. All these treasures of the Umbrian landscape were his. Well might he have anticipated, four hundred years before he was born, that greatest of American writers, and said, "I own the landscape!" In frescos signed by Perugino ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... short-lived finery; a stillness as of death had fallen on the uninhabited house, and all was tranquil on the country road, stretching on one side across the tranquil fields, on the other towards the clustering houses of the village and the low spire which pointed to heaven. "Lizzie," she said, "if it is never put right,—and perhaps it will never be put right, for who can tell?—if you will come with me who know so much about it, we will go and be missionaries to these poor girls. I will ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... is divided into little rectangular patches of various verdure, —yellow-blossomed broom, blue-flowering flax, and the contrasting green of lupines, beans, Indian corn, and potatoes. There is not a spire of genuine grass on the island, except on the Consul's lawn, but wilds covered with red heather, low faya-bushes, (whence the name of the island,) and a great variety of mosses. The cattle are fed on beans and lupines. Firewood is obtained from the opposite island of Pico, five miles off, and from ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralise in before returning homewards; ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the interior of the edifice, who overthrew that colossal figure of Saint Christopher, proverbial among statues by the same right as the great hall of the palace among halls, as the spire of Strasburg among steeples? And those myriad statues which peopled every space between the columns of the choir and the nave, kneeling, standing, on horseback, men, women, children, kings, bishops, men-at-arms—of stone, of marble, of gold, of silver, of copper, nay even of wax—who brutally ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... suppose that in a country journey we arrive at the summit of a hill, at whose foot lies a charming village imbosomed in trees from the midst of which, rises the white spire of the village church. If we are in a poetical mood, we say: "How beautiful is this retirement! This quiet retreat, away from the world's distractions and great temptations, must be the abode of domestic and social virtue—the home of contentment, of peace, and of an unquestioning ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... the Jesuits. To this day it is possibly the most symmetrical in appearance of any church of the Church of England in Canada. Exteriorly, it is 135 feet in length and 73 in breadth, while the height of the spire above the ground is 152 feet, the height from the floor to the centre arch, within, being 41 feet. The communion plate, together with the altar cloth, hangings of the desk and pulpit of crimson velvet and cloth of gold, and the books for divine service, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... was not alone in his love for the wide reaches, level as the sea, across which every village spire could be seen for many a mile. Not very far away, in clear weather, the great tower of Boston, not ungraceful, stood out in awe-inspiring grandeur against the sky, and was pointed out with pride and pleasure by all who loved the fens and rejoiced ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... sickle, was green and apparently growing through all the months of last winter. What a phenomenon it would have been, on the first of February last, to a New England farmer, suddenly transported from his snow-buried hills to the view of this landscape the same day! Not a spire of grass or grain was alive when he left his own homestead. All was cold and dead. The very earth was frozen to the solidity and sound of granite. It was a relief to his eye to see the snow fall upon the scene and hide it two feet deep for months. He looks upon this, then upon the one he left ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the store, however, and as far as she could see toward Cardhaven, were better homes, some standing in the midst of tilled fields and orchards. Sandy lanes led to these homesteads from the highway. She could see the blunt spire of the Mariner's Chapel. Yet Cap'n Abe's house and store stood quite alone, for none of the other dwellings were ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... lightning is because they project up into the air, and according to their height, they remove a corresponding amount of the poorly conducting air. If the lower edge of a thunder-cloud is two thousand five hundred feet above the air, and the spire of a church is five hundred feet high, it follows that it is easier for a flash to jump two thousand feet than two thousand five hundred. So when the electricity-bearing cloud comes over the church spire ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... I hadn't seen this before," she breathed. "Look—'way off there, with those trees and the houses and that lovely church spire, and the river shining just like silver. Why, Nancy, there doesn't anybody need any pictures with that to look at. Oh, I'm so glad now she ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent,—higher than which is nothing. Puns I have not made many (nor punch much) since the date of my last; one I cannot help relating. A constable in Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathedral; upon which I remarked that they must be very sharp-set. But in general I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. I am stuffed out so with eating turkey for dinner, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... spite of herself, as she saw the spire of St. Clement's Dane, where she was told they must turn City-wards, she began to talk, and Anthony ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... house in all directions. The surrounding country is undulating and highly picturesque. North and south the eye ranges over a vast extent of lovely scenery; and on the west, looking over the town of Chesterfield, with its church and crooked spire, the extensive range of the Derbyshire hills bounds the distance. The Midland Railway skirts the western edge of the park in a deep rock cutting, and the shrill whistle of the locomotive sounds near at hand as the trains speed past. The ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... was set apart for her, next to her bedroom nearly at the top of the house, and which commanded a wide view of the Manor park-lands, and the village of St. Rest, with the silvery river winding through it, and the spire of the church rising from the surrounding foliage like a finger pointing to heaven. And she also found relief from the strain of constant entertaining by rising early in the mornings and riding on her favourite 'Cleopatra' all over her property, calling ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... huge park with a sprinkling of houses in it than anything else. The green foliage rolls over it like the waves of the ocean, and the houses rise up like isolated habitations. Now and then a red brick building, or the slender white spire of a church gave a touch of colour to the landscape, and contrasted pleasantly with the bluish-white roofs and green trees. Scattered all through the town were the huge mounds of earth marking the mining-shafts of various colours, from dark brown to pure ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... while he embarked again in the very same nut-shell of a boat that he had left Egypt in, passed right under the bows of the English vessels, and set foot once more in France. France acknowledged him; the sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; and all the people cried, "Long live ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... anybody else. It was late July, the great heats were gone for the time at least, and they were brisk and elated. They paused a little while in Capitol Square, and looked at the Bell Tower, rising like a spire, from the crest of which alarms were rung, then at the fine structure of St. Paul's Church. They intended to go into the State House now used as the Confederate Capitol, but that must wait until ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... or remarkable. It was at Wellington College that he was born, in the Master's Lodge, in a sunny bedroom, in the south-east corner of the house; one of its windows looking to the south front of the college and the chapel with its slender spire; the other window looking over the garden and a waste of heather beyond, to the fir-crowned hill of Ambarrow. My father had been Headmaster for twelve years and was nearing the end of his time there; and I was myself nine years old, and shortly to go to a ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... straight ahead. Before me lay the village, a cluster of white houses embowered in trees. It was sunset; the rain had washed the leaves and laid the dust in the road; the air was exquisitely fragrant and of uncommon softness; the white spire of the village church, flanked by a long line of poplars, was gilded with a sunbeam, but the lowly roofs of the villagers were bathed in the radiant twilight that had deepened under the western hills. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... no longer exists. Three hundred thousand of its choicest acres are now held in severalty by the fifteen hundred members of the Sisseton and Wahpeton Band of the Dakotas—the "Leaf Dwellers" of the plains. Their homes, their schools, their churches cover the prairies. That spire pointing heavenward rises from Good Will Church, a commodious, well-furnished edifice, with windows of stained glass. Within its walls, there worship on the Sabbath, scores of dusky Presbyterian Christians. The pastor, the Rev. Charles Crawford, in whose veins there flows the mingled blood of the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... second the noise grew louder, coming their way. The tracks squeaked as the car turned around the rock spire, obviously seeking them out. A large carrier, big as a truck, it stopped before them in a cloud of its own dust and the driver ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... purple on the hill, The village spire, the ivy'd tow'r, The sparkling wheel of yonder mill, The grove, green field, and op'ning flow'r, Are ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... pleasant village of Delafield Savory Gray, Esq., hired a large house, with an avenue of young lindens in front, a garden on one side, and a spacious play-ground in the rear. The pretty pond was not far away, with its sloping shores and neat villas, and a distant spire upon the opposite bank—the whole like the vignette of an English pastoral poem. Here the merchant turned from importing pongees to inculcating principles. His old friends sent some of their children to the new school, and persuaded their friends ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... leaden-covered church, lying like a great grey beetle with outspread wings. Beyond were the ups- and-downs of a wooded, hilly country, with glimpses of blue river here and there, and village and town gleaming out white; a large house, "bosomed high in tufted trees;" a church-tower and spire, nestled on the hill-side, up to the steep grey hill with the tall land-mark tower, closing in the horizon-altogether, as Carey said, a thorough "allegro" landscape, even to "the tanned haycock in the mead." ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Oaklawn," said Frank, pointing to the spire of a church in the distance. "We cannot ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... sublime, and knew we ought to feel its grandeur, but somehow we did not. Then we sat down by the Holy of Holies, and there we were startled into a better judgment by the astounding fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul—the largest edifice in Great Britain—could stand upright, spire, dome, body, and all, inside of St. Peter's! that the letters of the inscription which run around the base of the dome, though apparently but an inch, are in reality six feet high! Then, for the first time, the scales fell from our eyes; the giant building began to grow; higher and higher ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... a perfect panorama of healthy, open English country. Purple hills hemmed in a broad, green, undulating plateau, scored across and across by the stone walls of the north, and all dappled with the shadows of rolling leaden clouds with silver fringes. Miles away a church spire stuck like a spike out of the hollow, and the smoke of a village dimmed the trees behind. No nearer habitation could I see. I have mentioned a hamlet which we passed in the spring-cart. It lay hidden behind some hillocks ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... summits rear Still as its spire, and yonder flock At rest in those calm fields appear As ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... things; and though seventy-eight years of age, every faculty of head and heart seemed to keep pace with the times. He was a Wesleyan Methodist, and with pleasure told us of the erection of their new Zion, whose glistening tinned spire we could see rising among the woods ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... the spelling of which seems to have puzzled last century writers greatly, for they wrote it "Jermyn," "Germain," "Germaine," and even "Germin." St. James's Church, Wren's handiwork, is all that remains from the age of Anne, with "the steeple," says Strype, fondly, "lately finished with a fine spire, which adds much splendor to this end of the town, and also serves as a landmark." Perhaps it sometimes served as a landmark to Richard Steele, reeling happily to the home in "Berry" Street, where his beloved Prue awaited him. St. James's Square has gone through ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Nuremberg; and if Charles had declared in favor of the Lutherans, all Germany would probably have changed its religion. As it was, the Reformation made progress during the war between the emperor and Clement VII. All that Charles acquired from the diet of Spire, in 1526, was to wait patiently for a general council, without encouraging novelties. In 1530, he assisted in person at the diet of Augsburg, when the Protestants (a name bestowed on the reformers in consequence ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... thick, black smoke—and certainly no better method exists of exploring the short stretches of open country that lie between town and town. Belgian towns, remember, lie mostly thick on the ground—you are hardly out of Brussels before you come to Malines, and hardly out of Malines ere you sight the spire of Antwerp. In no part of Europe, perhaps, save in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, do you find so many big towns in so limited a space; yet the strips of country that lie between, though often intolerably dull, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... a few minutes at Willesden Junction, our Irish horse pulls harder, and bolts with us for Rugby and some intermediate stations. It is just half-past seven a.m., a beautiful day. There is Harrow on the left, we can see the well-known spire, and we recall the days when we came up for the cricket-match against Eton, and how we all went back in a ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... there he rears extensive woods. He makes himself places of habitation; and busy cities spring up as the trophies of his diligence and skill. His labors, as they grow upon the waste, affect the appearance of vast continents; until at length, from many a hill-top and tall spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on which he has not built, or sown, or planted, or around which lie has not erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great department of industry, is what none of his predecessors upon the earth ever were,—"a fellow-worker" with the Creator. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... you are amused; yet you are touched, and the illusion grows every moment. You see the approaching stranger, and the mysterious conversation grows more and more interesting. Emmaus rises in the distance, in the likeness of a New England village, with a white meeting house and spire. You follow the travellers; you enter the house with them; nor do you wake from your trance until, with streaming eyes, the preacher tells you that "they saw it was the Lord Jesus—and what a pity it was they could not have known ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... plants, and studied the whole subject. I was all the more attracted to it, from not being at all satisfied with the explanation which Henslow gave us in his lectures, about twining plants, namely, that they had a natural tendency to grow up in a spire. This explanation proved quite erroneous. Some of the adaptations displayed by Climbing Plants are as beautiful as those of ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... Thames through the wilderness of illuminated boats. The air was laden with music; the river banks were beruffled with joy-flames; the distant city lay in a soft luminous glow from its countless invisible bonfires; above it rose many a slender spire into the sky, incrusted with sparkling lights, wherefore in their remoteness they seemed like jewelled lances thrust aloft; as the fleet swept along, it was greeted from the banks with a continuous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... river curved again, sweeping back to its original course. Suddenly, in the distance, the bright spire of the Settlement church came into view, and then the familiar cottages. Mandy Ann's laughing face grew grave, as she saw how very, very far away they looked. They took on, also, from the distance, a certain strangeness ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... spire then I saw, An' I wor rare an' fain, Fer near it stood t'owd parsonage— I ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... peak. The most pleasing, notable structures men build from granite and steel and wood, tower like a Woolworth Building or a Rheims Cathedral—higher and higher, until they finally reach a gold- tipped crown or spire, ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... great spire Tawny in the sunlight. Gargoyles haunt its nave; High up amid its dark-arches Forgotten songs live shadowy. Gold and sardonyx Deck its altars. Its mighty roof Is copper ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... clergy, who irreverently styled themselves the Cocks of the Almighty, their duty being, like the cock which roused Peter, to call the people to repentance, or at any rate to church. These are the longest-lived birds we know of. The one which had been perched on the old spire of St. Martin's for a hundred years or more was brought down July 22, 1853, and may still be seen at Aston Hall, along with the old bird that tumbled off Aston church October 6, 1877. The last was made of copper in July, 1830, and contained, among other ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... speech. Many of the inscriptions, though with less of sunny hope and joy than even Christian grave-stones bear, are yet mournfully beautiful.[33] They preach Buddhism in its reality. Whereas, the general associations of the Christian spire and belfry, apart from the note of time, are those of joy, invitation and good news, those of the tongueless and log-struck bells of Buddhism are sombre and saddening. "As merry as a marriage bell," could never be said of the boom from a Buddhist ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... river stands, on a vast block of granite, a colossal equestrian statue of Peter the Great, with his arm stretched out in an attitude of command. Forming the different sides of this vast open space are some of the finest public buildings in the city: the Admiralty with its golden spire, the beautiful Isaac Church with its superb granite columns, the Winter Palace with its long rows of richly ornamented windows, the War Office, the Senate House, and many others. At one end, with a crescent of fine buildings before it, which contain the War Office, stands a lofty ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... in judgment on their father!—then The spire of Holy Church may prick the graves— Her crypt among the stars. Sign? seal? I promised The King to obey these customs, not yet written, Saving mine order; true too, that when written I sign'd them—being a fool, as Foliot call'd me. I hold not by my signing. Get ye hence, ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... in it would of itself be a novelty to an American. Our summer cities consist wholly of wooden buildings, but Tenby, from the point of its ponderous pier, where the waves break as on a rock, to the tip of its church-spire, which the clouds kiss, is every inch of stone. Welshmen will not build even so insignificant a structure as a pig-sty out of boards if there are stones to be had. I have seen stone pig-sties in Glamorganshire with walls a foot thick and six hundred years old. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... by name, of Middleburg, had in his shop a curious toy, rigged up, it is said, by an apprentice, and made out of a couple of spectacle lenses, whereby, if one looked through it, the weather-cock of a neighbouring church spire was seen nearer ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... fifty new churches, being then in a state of decay. The present church, which is very solid, and has dignity of outline, was the work of Flitcroft, and was opened April 14, 1734. The steeple is 160 feet high, with a rustic pedestal, a Doric story, an octagonal tower, and spire. The basement is of rusticated Portland stone, of which the church is built, and quoins of the same material decorate the windows and angles within. It follows the lines of the period, with hardly any chancel, wide galleries on three sides standing on piers, from which columns ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... noon in the city of Antwerp. From slender steeples floated the mellow music of the Flemish bells, and in the spire of the great cathedral across the square the cracked chimes clashed discords until my ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... red rim of the sun sink behind the western crests, and then the last twilight died into the night. Heavy darkness trailed over the forest, but soon moon and stars sprang out, and the sky became silver, the spire of smoke reappearing across its southern face. But Willet, who was in reality the leader of the little party, gave no sign. Grosvenor knew that they were waiting for the majority of St. Luc's force to go to sleep, leaving only the sentinels before they approached, but it was hard to sit ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... puzzling. How long Mrs. John Shadrack had been entertaining me, or I had been entertaining her, I had not the remotest idea. A very long while ago I had seen a spire of smoke curling through the trees in Happy Valley, and I had been told that it was from her hearth. Then we had gone plunging madly down the hill to it, Tip, the gray colt and I. We had turned a sharp ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... white, green-shuttered passenger-boats; and behind them those desperate and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their sagging roofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably with the shipping; and then growing up from all, rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and spire, and dome,—a fair and noble sight, indeed, and one not surpassed for a certain quiet and cleanly beauty by any ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... trespass; but those invited there found in this quiet sun-trap many headstones, bearing names and dates and epitaphs. Close by, a path, along which members of the family went often to and fro, led to yet another quiet corner, where a well-known spire showed above the trees. From this last there sounded at intervals the music of bells, chiming, or ringing solemnly, and beneath its shadow slept other folk, who had once walked the world with these same dogs of many generations, earning epitaphs no better, if as good, as they. To lie in either, ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... he quitted the near view, and let his eye run along the edge of the horizon, until it rested upon a small speck, which he knew to be the lofty spire of Saint Paul's Cathedral. If, as he supposed, the Fair Geraldine was in attendance upon Anne Boleyn, at the palace at Bridewell, she must be under the shadow of this very spire; and the supposition, whether correct or not, produced such quick and stifling emotions, that the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... minaret Among sandy gardens set, And the rich goods from near and far Hang for sale in the bazaar;— Where the Great Wall round China goes, And on one side the desert blows, And with bell and voice and drum, Cities on the other hum;— Where are forests, hot as fire, Wide as England, tall as a spire, Full of apes and cocoa-nuts And the negro hunters' huts;— Where the knotty crocodile Lies and blinks in the Nile, And the red flamingo flies Hunting fish before his eyes;— Where in jungles, near and far, Man-devouring tigers are, Lying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... group are both of older and of more modern date. Another very extensive genus, especially in America, is Platyceras (fig. 72, a and f), with its thin fragile shell—often hardly coiled up at all—its minute spire, and its widely-expanded, often sinuated mouth. The British Acroculioe should probably be placed here, and the group has with reason been regarded as allied to the Violet-snails (Ianthina) of the open Atlantic. The species of Platyostoma (fig. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... which the house was built ran away on the left to the mist-shrouded horizon without another building of any kind in sight. Desmond surmised that Morstead Fen lay in the direction in which he was looking. To the right, Desmond caught a glimpse of a ghostly spire sticking out of some trees and guessed that this was Wentfield Church. In front of him the distant roar of a passing train showed where the Great Eastern ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... widening distance, at a town passed a moment ago. A flourishing city, according to the prospectus; a commonplace aggregation of architecture, you say; respectable middle-class homes; time-serving cottages built on the same plan; a heaven-seeking spire; perhaps a work of art in library or townhall. You are rather glad that you have left it behind; rather certain that soon you will have rolled ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... soldiers, gazing at the spire of the church, sighed sadly. They marched forward through the canyon, uncertain, unsteady, as blind men walking without a hand to guide them. The bitterness of ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... this picture—a potato field, a country lad and a country girl standing in the middle of it, and on the far horizon the spire of a village church. That is all there is to it—no great scenery and no picturesque people. In Roman Catholic countries at the evening hour the church bell rings out to remind the people to pray. Some go into the church, while those that are in the fields bow their ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... use before and at the conquest; from the circumstance of its being built with the materials of the neighbouring Roman work, it will perhaps be no anachronism to assign to it a date prior to that period. The tower is also Saxon; and the spire having been damaged by the wind is ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... box; and in the lighted doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and apron, waiting to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would be the bright fire, the cheerful supper table, the soft bed ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... but there is no other meat. Well may the hearers' ears go aching; for thy cry, man, proceedeth from thy aching belly. But now I will set the song again, and tell thee of a lady girdled with fine gold. Beneath the girdle beats a red heart; but her spirit is like a spire of blue smoke, that comes from a fire, indeed, but strains up to heaven. Warmed by that fire, like that smoke I fly up; and so I lie among the stars ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... sea fog wrapped a shroud Round spar and spire and tarn and tree, Her soul went up on that lifted cloud From this sad old ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... the nearer hills to the south. The small river Avon winds through the city, pleasantly bordered by terraces and gardens. The wide streets cross one another for the most part at right angles. The predominance of stone and brick as building materials, the dominating cathedral spire, and the well-planted parks, avenues and private gardens, recall the aspect of an English residential town. Christchurch is mainly dependent on the rich agricultural district which surrounds it, the plain being mainly devoted to cereals and grazing. Wool is extensively worked, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... cried the Goblin, "she's only rolling a little;" and, as he said this, the clock steadied itself and sailed serenely away past the spire of the village church and off over ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... heart became more and more impregnated with the beauty of holiness, and the prayers of men ascended with somewhat of purer aspiration to heaven, so did they build their tower-roofs higher and higher into the air, till at length the spire was born. In one of those quaint antique towers of Normandy, Coutances, it was first fully developed; and it is curious to see how in this instance its roof-origin was still remembered: for it has tall, gabled garret-windows rising from its base, connected by rude cross-bars ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... battlements into the street, a hundred feet below us; while clambering half-way up were foxglove-flowers, weeds, small shrubs, and tufts of grass, that had rooted themselves into the roughnesses of the stone foundation. Far around us lay a rich and lovely English landscape, with many a church-spire and noble country-seat, and several objects of high historic interest. Edge Hill, where the Puritans defeated Charles I., is in sight on the edge of the horizon, and much nearer stands the house where Cromwell lodged on the night before the battle. Right ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... by the village road, And they yell'd at the village spire! And they laid him at rest in his long abode, In a storm of revenge and ire; And round him their furious banners wave. Be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... nearly as happy as a man can be. He rather stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hill, a spur of a mountain, separated them from the Union army. It was only those like Dick and his comrades who mounted elevations and who had powerful field glasses who could see into Sharpsburg. The main Union force saw only the top of a church spire or two in the village. But each felt fully the presence of the other and knew that the battle ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... enough once, and the brothers grew fat, Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl, Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul. But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire, And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary, Where only the wind sings miserere. Of what the monks came by no legend runs, At least they were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... of Duerer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much to outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he may leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark sky and the dark village spire: and the scene becomes real and sunny only by the addition ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... venerable vicar of Worthing, the Rev. E. K. Elliott, records that the clerk of Broadwater was himself a smuggler, and in league with those who throve by the illicit trade. When a cargo was expected he would go up to the top of the spire, which afforded a splendid view of the sea, and when the coast was clear of preventive officers he would give the signal by hoisting a flag. Kegs of contraband spirits were frequently placed inside two huge tombs which have sliding tops, and which stand near ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... through it with red rayless countenance. But before we reached the church, which was some three miles from home, the fog was gone, and the frost had taken shelter with the shadows; the sun was dazzling without being clear, and the golden cock on the spire was glittering keen in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... stories reminds me that I have something that may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Colonel Dewes to a corner of the garden where, upon a grass mound, there was a garden seat. From this seat one overlooked the garden hedge. To the left, the little village of Poynings with its grey church and tall tapering spire, lay at the foot of the gap in the Downs where runs the Brighton road. Behind them the Downs ran like a rampart to right and left, their steep green sides scarred here and there by landslips and showing the white chalk. Far away the high trees of Chanctonbury Ring ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... a step down yonder lane, And the little church stands near, The church where we were wed, Mary, I see the spire from here. But the graveyard lies between, Mary, And my step might break your rest— For I've laid you, darling! down to sleep, With your baby ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... came to a brook to drink, When, leaning o'er its crumbling brink, An Ant fell in, and vainly tried, In this, to her, an ocean tide, To reach the land; whereat the Dove, With every living thing in love, Was prompt a spire of grass to throw her, By which the ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... this mood that Eglantine found me ruminating on the noble works before me, while resting against a part of the pile of Radcliffe library, contemplating 249the elegant crocketed pinnacles of All Souls, the delicately taper spire of St. Mary's, and the clustered enrichments and imperial canopies of masonry, and splendid traceries which every where strike the eye: all of which objects were rendered trebly impressive from the stillness of the night, and the flittering light by which they were ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and Peter looked out over the old town. In the glow of sunset the thin iron modern spire of the cathedral had a grace not its own, and the roofs below it showed strong and almost sentient. One could imagine that the distant cathedral brooding over the city heard, saw, and spoke, if in another language than ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... that the incident was an unfavorable omen, and would discourage his men. He cast about in his mind for a means of retaliation. Far over the roofs of the city rose a tapering spire, that of the cathedral in the Upper Town. On this spire, the devout Catholics of the French city had hung a picture of the Holy Family as an invocation of Divine aid. Through his spy-glass, Phipps could see that ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... creature of all others the most complex, is not to be stumbled upon by chance. You may make two stones lean upright one against the other by chance, but otherwise than by a methodical application of means to the end you could not support the spire of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... cutting off pretty ladies' heads when he had tired of their hearts. Several tombs are so lovely, you almost want to be dead, and have one as like as possible; but, though part of the cathedral is satisfyingly old (eleventh century), its new spire reminds one of a badly chosen hat, and the whole building somehow looks cold and dull, like a person with a magnificent profile who never says ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... seemed to spiritualize her "happy autumn fields," and bring them into a closer kinship with the blue over-arching sky. There was one large house or mansion in sight, but no town, nor even a hamlet, and not one solitary spire. In vain I scanned the horizon, waiting impatiently to see the distant puff of white steam from some passing engine. This troubled me not a little, for I had no idea that I had drifted so far from civilization in my search for specimens, or whatever it was that ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... a good macadam road and down hill, so that Baron did not object to the extra strain put upon his legs. The spire of Glenbury Church loomed ahead; in a few more minutes they began to see the roofs of the houses. They crossed the bridge over the river, turned the corner by the King's Arms Inn, and were trotting at a good pace along Castle Street, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... important features, neither of which can be left out, want a little bringing together or separating before the spirit of the place can be well given, they must be brought together, or separated. Which is a more truthful view, of Shrewsbury, for example, from a spot where St. Alkmund's spire is in parallax with St. Mary's—a view which should give only the one spire which can be seen, or one which should give them both, although the one is hidden? There would be, I take it, more representation in the misrepresentation than in the representation—"the half ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... hill, and the bell tower of old St. Mary's rose sombre and dignified against the soft sunset sky. At the right were the Park, with a home-going tide pouring through it at this hour, and Kearney Street with its jangling car bells, and below, the square roofs of the warehouse district, and the spire of the ferry building, and the bay framed in its rim of hills. Montiverte owned the house in which he conducted his business; it was one of the oldest in the city, built by the French pioneers who were the first to erect permanent ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... of churches and inns, the former depicted in delightfully distorted perspective and the latter by two or three half-circular strokes. That there may be no confusion between church and inn, the possibility of which is suggested by the fact that several of the latter are adorned with spire-like embellishments, the sixteenth-century cartographer told which were which in so many words. It is by close attention to the letter-press, and by observing the frequent appearance of names which have age-long association with houses of entertainment, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... was six feet high, and the upper stone about twenty. I was endeavoring to find some gap in the hedge, when I discovered one of the inhabitants in the next field, advancing toward the stile, of the same size with him whom I saw in the sea pursuing our boat. He appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple, and took about ten yards at every stride, as near as I could guess. I was struck with the utmost fear and astonishment, and ran to hide myself in the corn, whence I saw him at the top ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight. To the east lay the silver glimmer of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, a church spire among the trees and a winding country road traveled by the solitary ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... company assembled at Burley on the Hill, the mansion of the bride's father, which, from one of the noblest terraces in the island, looks down on magnificent woods of beech and oak, on the rich valley of Catmos, and on the spire of Oakham. The father of the bridegroom was detained to London by indisposition, which was not supposed to be dangerous. On a sudden his malady took an alarming form. He was told that he had but a few hours to live. He received the intimation ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Cartoner arrived at St. Petersburg. The long northern twilight had begun, and the last glow of the western sky was reflected on the golden dome of St. Isaac's, while the arrowy spire of the Admiralty shot up ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... were, the sacred Host, and remembering the divine Sacrifice of Calvary, I felt hope enter into my soul. For some time longer the wheels crunched the snow. At last the driver pointed with the end of his whip to the spire of Artigues as it rose like a shadow ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... one uneasy and anxious. When we see persons in situations which strongly suggest the idea of danger to our minds, it makes us uneasy, though we may know that there is no actual danger in the case. Thus it is painful to most persons to see a carpenter upon a very lofty spire, or to go very near a precipice, or see any body else go, even when there is a strong railing; and so in all other cases. Therefore, our rule ought always to be, when we are in company with others, not only not to go ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... ends protruding at the angles. There was no great originality of design, merely the delightful picturesqueness which unstripped logs never fail to yield. She knew that every detail of the building was to be carried out in the same way. The roof, the spire, the porches, even the fence which was ultimately ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... city of Coventry stands upon a little hill, with old St. Michael's steeple and the spire of Holy Trinity church rising above it against the sky; and as the master-player and the boy came climbing upward from the south, walls, towers, chimneys, and red-tiled roofs were turned to gold by the ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... now saw the majestic outlines of the Grand-pere for the first time. The great rock rose above the water like some immense Gothic cathedral. The illusion was heightened by a giant spire that towered grandly from the center of the islet. It looked a shrine built by nature in honor of its Creator, a true temple of the infinite, and the semblance was no illusion to these three castaways, since they regarded it as a sanctuary to which alone, under Heaven, they might owe their lives. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... but I maintain that the Catholics have as good a right to their churches as we have to ours and that the Huns had no kind of business to destroy them. Just think, Mrs. Dr. dear," concluded Susan pathetically, "how we would feel if a German shell knocked down the spire of our church here in the glen, and I'm sure it is every bit as bad to think of Rangs ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in the moonlight from St. Ambrose's quadrangle, and, when we are clear of the clock-tower, steer away southwards, over Oxford city and all its sleeping wisdom and folly, over street and past spire, over Christ Church and the canons' houses, and the fountain in Tom quad; over St. Aldate's and the river, along which the moonbeams lie in a pathway of twinkling silver, over the railway sheds—no, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... hope was entertained that Lydia would be able to come out to him in India. A correspondence likewise began, which has been in great part preserved. Two days after weighing anchor, the Union still lingered on the coast, and the well-known outline, with Mount's Bay, the spire of St. Hilary's church, and all the landmarks so dear and familiar to the young Cornishman's eye and heart, were watched from morning to night with keen pain and grief, but with steadfast resolve and ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... their savings home. When the missionaries landed there was nothing but a Portuguese Catholic church in the settlement, and the Governor was raising subscriptions for that pretty building in which Carey preached till he died, and the spire of which the Governor-General is said to have erected to improve the view of the town from the windows of his ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... close of a long day's journey, while the twilight gave a mysterious hue to a scene in itself singular and stately.—Glistening spire on spire; massive piles, which in the deepening haze might be either prisons or palaces; vast ranges of buildings, gloomy or glittering as the partial ray fell on them; with the solemn beauty of the Invalides on one wing, the light and lovely elegance of the St Genevieve on the other, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the granite boulders is a church dedicated to Saint-Sulpice, whose name is given to the suburb which lies across the Nancon. This suburb, flung as it were to the bottom of a precipice, and its church, the spire of which does not rise to the height of the rocks which threaten to crush it, are picturesquely watered by several affluents of the Nancon, shaded by trees and brightened by gardens. The whole region of Fougeres, its suburbs, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... the Napoleonic glare, Divinely raised by that in her divine, Not the clear sight of Earth's blunt actual swerves When her lost look, as on a wave of wine, Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries Caress with folds and curves The fortress over Rhine, Beneath the one tall spire. Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs, Her anguish in desire, She sees, above the brutish paw Alert on her still quivering limb - As little in past time she saw, Nor when dispieced as prey, As victrix when abhorred - A Grand Germania, stout ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... considerable antiquity; and it stood, as we have already said, on the opposite side of the road to the church, looking towards the west end, where its handsome tower stands, with lofty well-proportioned spire, a conspicuous object to all the fen country for miles around. It was about a mile from ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from the violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... thoughts from the end of my spine, by concentrating them in admiration upon the scene. There was the Sphinx welcoming us with an immense smile of benevolence, as suitable to the sunshine as had been her mysterious solemnity to the moonlight. There, far away to the left, the spire-crowned Citadel floated in translucent azure. Its domes and minarets, and the long serrated line of the Mokattam Hills were carved against the sky in the yellow-rose of pink topaz. Shafts of light ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the stile a-top o' the Barn field," said Mary, "and look across Pardons to the next spire. It's directly under. You can't miss it—not if you keep to the footpath. My sister's the telegraphist there. But you're in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this door from ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... plains. A mountain chipmunk stared at him, flicked its tail, and dived under a flat ledge; a bird whose real home was a thousand miles off in the north faced the upland breeze and sang in its unknown tongue. Jim drew still nearer the rocky spire, rounded a ledge, and faced an unexpected sight. In a little open lodge of willows, bent and roofed with a canvas cover, sat an Indian youth, alone, motionless, beside him was a pot of water, and between him and the tall ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... "tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," for three miles more, and when we had given up all hope of eating or resting again we saw, at the bottom of a hill, silhouetted against the violet sky the spire of a church, but we did not breathe our hopes lest it might vanish like a dream. Soon we came to a house, and instinctively the column halted, but it was "On, on, ye brave!" yet a little longer, then suddenly a company was snatched up by the ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... like mine, and thou art bold; Nay, heap not the dying fire; It warms not me, I am too cold, Cold as the churchyard spire; If thou cover me up with fold on fold, Thou kill'st not ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... whole world. Before long he embarked in the same little cockleshell of a boat he had had in Egypt, sailed round the beard of the English, set foot in France, and France acclaimed him. The sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; all France cried out with one voice, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!' In this region, here, the enthusiasm for that wonder of the ages was, I may say, solid. Dauphine behaved well; and I am particularly pleased to know that her people wept when they saw, once more, the gray top-coat. March first ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... It depends on which way the spire falls. If it falls outward, I fear the whole city ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... as little time as possible in paying our devoirs to so wondrous a personage. The church is a very venerable structure, surmounted by a spire covered with slate. The Saint was the wife of Clotaire the First, and quitted her court to live a religious life, having built a monastery in honour of the true cross, a piece of which had been sent to her from Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian. She erected a church ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... and look out over the Common. To our right, near the intersection of Boylston and Tremont Streets, lies the half-forgotten, almost obliterated Central Burying Ground, the final resting-place of Gilbert Stuart, the famous American painter. At the left points the spire of Park Street Church, notable not for its age, for it is only a little over a century old, but for its charming beauty, and by the fact that William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first address here, and here "America" was sung in public for ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary, Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird, Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles, Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... eye fell upon the spire of St. James's Church, on Clerkenwell Green, whose bells used to be so familiar to her. The memory was only of discontent and futile aspiration, but—Oh, if it were possible to be again as she was then, and yet keep the experience ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... surrounded by pleasant grounds, stands a convenient, well-ventilated chapel, with a high spire or steeple. At the entrance, where some of the mourners might prefer to take leave of the body, are chambers for their accommodation. Within the edifice are seats for those who follow the remains to the last: there is also ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... he will have his habitation there while man shall dwell upon earth. He has laid the foundation of his monument upon universal benevolence. Its superstructure is composed of good and noble deeds. Its spire is the love of God which ascends to Heaven." Such ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... brown sandstone raised in colossal blocks. The spire, floriated richly and graduated with a precise symmetry, rises to an extreme altitude of 220 feet 6 inches. The extreme length is about 170 ft. The massive oaken front doors are carved handsomely, and contain the arms of the Stewart family, the Clinch family (Mrs. Stewart's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... desperate flings of forward hoofs—which caused the children to scatter—were familiar objects, not only in the cluster of Uphams, but also in Dale and Granby, and the little outlying hamlet of Ford's Hill, which was nothing but a scattering group of farm-houses, with a spire in their midst, and which came under the jurisdiction of Upham. In all these villages people were wont to run from the windows to the doors when they saw the doctor's sulky whirl past, peer after it, up or down the road, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The different sides of the Chapelle are in the same style—with buttresses between the windows, gables surmounting these, and a fine open parapet crowning all. The roof is sloping, and the height is over a hundred feet. The spire measures, from the vaulting, seventy feet. We entered by a stair-case the upper chapel, and an exquisite view presented itself. A single apartment, a half-circular chair, with fine, large windows, detached columns with ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite variety of habitations. Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire, "a pretty pyramis of stone," as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the river water spouted ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sensitive, and repeated deaths forced upon him the conviction that he too must eventually die, St. Germain not only lost all its charms, but became a place obnoxious to him. From the terrace there could be distinctly seen, a few leagues to the east, the tower and spire of St. Denis, the burial-place of the kings of France. To Louis it suddenly became as torturing a sight as to have had his coffin ostentatiously ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... like a cloud o'er her brain. You gaze through a sort of traditional mist, And behold a mirage of God's laws which exist But in fancy. God made but one law—it is love. A law for the earth, and the kingdoms above, A law for the woman, a law for the man, The base and the spire of His intricate plan Of existence. All evils the world ever saw Had birth in man's breaking away from this law. God cancels a marriage when love flies away. "Till death do us part" should be altered to say, "Till disgust or indifference part us." I ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... I know not how to distinguish it, except by its great size and the height of its spire, from those other ancient churches in different parts of the kingdom, which used to be called monuments of Gothic architecture; but it is now agreed, that this stile is Saracen rather than Gothic; and, I suppose, it was first imported ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... of St. Stiff the Martyr is calling to service, as it is wont to do at all times and hours—for mysterious purposes but little known:—it seems as if the bell disliked its little wooden cottage, on the unfinished spire; or was inspired, or in a towering passion to live in a tower, or saw no fun in waiting for funds; and so, continually pealed an appeal to the public:—however, it was a puny, little, curious bell, with a tongue of its own, now clacking for a charity sermon; and, curiously, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... scene of my youth, Seat of Friendship and Truth, Where Love chac'd each fast-fleeting year, Loth to leave thee I mourn'd, For a last look I turn'd, But thy spire was scarce ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... a salient object in the heavens surpassing the stony eminences which surrounded it, rose the tall spire of the twin Houses of Parliament. Upon its top swung a gilded weathercock; while about a portion of its base stood a maze of scaffolding, the facade of the building having during the last few months been under repair. There seemed, however, for the moment, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Fosdyke was obliged to adapt herself to the somewhat leisurely procedure of highly respectable country-town hotels, whose cooks will not be hurried, and it was already dusk, and the moonlight was beginning to throw shadows of gable and spire over the old Market-Place, when she and Neale ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... queer pointed spire and a beautiful altar, stands with open doors like a kindly welcome to all. Back of this, and apologetically placed behind its ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... the subject. The drawing here reproduced from Britton's "Salisbury," shows the work before its restoration by Bishop Denison; but it has been chosen because it suggests the peculiar beauty of the place better than any photograph. From the cloisters a very charming glimpse of the spire may ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... shed their leaves, And against the morning's white The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night, We'll turn our faces southward, love, Toward the summer isle Where bamboos spire the shafted ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... building of which it is difficult to believe the early date,—the leaning tower of Pisa. The lower stories of it are of the twelfth century, and the open arcades of the cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca, as well as the lighter construction of the spire of St. Niccol, at Pisa, (though this was built in continuation of the older style by Niccola himself,) all represent to you, though in enriched condition, the general manner of buidling in palaces of the Norman period in Val d'Arno. That of the Tosinghi, above the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... of a brightly shining yellowish or greenish horn colour. The whorls of its spire are small, but the body whorl, whilst preserving a wide diameter throughout, gradually increases in trumpet-like manner to the round mouth. It belongs to the same group with H. olivetorum and H. nitida, and is allied to the Australian H. ptycomphala. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains. The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and pollards;[96] Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and a ditch. The Flemish sacred painters are the only ones who introduce mountains in the distance, as we shall see presently; but rather in a formal way than with any appearance of enjoyment. So Shakspere ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire? ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... unworthy lords hold wassail there, And wiser heads are drooping round its moats, At last they fix their steady and stiff eye There, there alone—stand while the trumpet blows, And view the hostile flames above its towers Spire, with ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... at the sight; the dash Phosphoric of the oar, or rapid twinkle Of the far lights of skimming gondolas,[434] And the responsive voices of the choir Of boatmen answering back with verse for verse; 100 Some dusky shadow checkering the Rialto; Some glimmering palace roof, or tapering spire,[eg] Are all the sights and sounds which here pervade The ocean-born and earth-commanding City— How sweet and soothing is this hour of calm! I thank thee, Night! for thou hast chased away Those ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... church edifice which graces this sightly spot, though sadly dealt with in its general symmetry, still lifts its lofty spire with undiminished beauty, and justifies the stirring lines ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call 'life'—and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it—and if you've acquired a feeling of gratitude for Pap and if you've got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you're a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma'am, I ask you, could you turn down a ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of every hearer. He touched graphically upon the power of fire; how it fractures the rock, softens obdurate metals, envelopes the prairies in flame, and how it seized upon the seats, ceiling and roof in his darling house of worship, thence fiercely ascending the spire to strive to rise still higher, and invade the clouds. From this he turned to the doctrine of submission, in a manner so earnest and pathetic that a perceptible agitation pervaded the audience, in which many could not suppress their tears. There was no laboring after effect. It was the natural ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... Warwickshire, and no tourist would know that it was not indigenous there. They call their local stream the Avon, and boating there some idle summer days, I easily dreamed myself at home again, and within bow-shot of the skyward-pointing spire which covers the bones of Shakespeare. It is, I believe, a fact that the stream is christened after another river than that which owes its glamour to the poet's name, but in a case of this kind mere fact matters little, and the inhabitants themselves ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... moat round their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,—that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... "perpendicular English" style of architecture—literally, a very general thing, the horizontal style being yet unworkable; is railed round; and has a dim, quiet elegance about its exterior. At the southern end there is a tower, with a spire, (surmounted by a cross) above it; the total height being 120 feet, It may be information to some people when we state that the first spire attached to any place of worship in Preston, was that we now see at St. Ignatius's. Indeed, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... is from the hill roads above Farncombe. Not many towns group themselves so well against hills and woods; few have so spacious and quiet a foreground. The church stands on the Wey; the churchyard runs down to the very banks, and the noble leaded spire lifts its chanticleer higher, I think, from the tower than any other church in Surrey. Between the foot of the hill and the Wey spreads wide meadowland; the Wey flows tranquilly by willow-herb and alder; beyond ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... appointed "chief master" of the works of the Duomo, then in progress, "with a yearly salary of one hundred gold florins, and the privilege of citizenship." He designed the Campanile, in a more perfect form than that which now exists; for his intended spire, 150 feet in height, never was erected. He, however, modelled the bas-reliefs for the base of the building, and sculptured two of them with his own hand. It was afterwards completed, with the exception of the spire, according to his design; but ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... brother on the other side of the road; how much its elegant structure and graceful spire adds to the beauty of the scene. Yet the funds for rearing that handsome building, which is such an ornament to the town, were chiefly derived from small subscriptions, drawn from the earnings of mechanics, day-labourers, and female servants. If the Church of England were supported ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... "'Only listen to that in Charleston streets!' exclaimed Garrison, on hearing the band of one of the black regiments playing the air of 'Old John Brown', and we both broke into tears," relates Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, who stood by the side of the pioneer that April morning under the spire of St. Michael's church. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... formed a noble and a graceful picture as they came sweeping rapidly down upon us with every stitch of canvas set that they could possibly spread, their white sails towering spire-like into the deep, tender blue of the cloudless heavens, with the delicate purple shadows chasing each other athwart the rounded bosoms of them as the hulls that up-bore them swung pendulum-like, with a little curl of snow under their bows, over the low hillocks ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... leaden steps through Tenth Street to Broadway, stopped and gazed for a moment on the graceful spire of the church before whose altar Nan would soon stand and perjure herself for money. How could she! He had long felt that in every true man's religion was a supreme belief in himself—in a woman's, faith in some one else. He knew that she believed ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... lofty spire of granite stands a wireless telegraph instrument. Fogs are thick about it, wild surges crash in the unfathomable depths below; the silence is that of chaos, before the first day of creation. Out of the emptiness, a world away, comes a ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... spread out in some places so as to afford sufficient breadths for cultivation; occasional hamlets appear amidst the fields and pine-woods; and far up, between you and the sky, an occasional church spire peeps up, indicating still loftier settlements, though how the people contrive to climb up to those heights is a wonder to the spectator who views ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... mass in the great Cathedral of Strasbourg, and was surprised and pleased at the sight of 10,000 soldiers, in review order, drawn up within its walls. It was tiresome enough work mounting to the top of the spire, (which I ascertained, by the steps I took, to be exactly 490 feet high, Strasbourg measure; and this is exactly eight feet higher than St. Peter's at Rome), but I made it out, notwithstanding the sulky looks of the jackanapes who lives at the top. Nothing can surpass the beauty of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... college with your brother John. We had been visiting the prisoners in Bocardo. As we turned into the Turl between Exeter and Jesus colleges there, at the end of the street—it is little more than a lane—beyond the spire of All Saints' this planet was shining. John told me its name, and with a sudden accord we stood still for a moment, watching it. 'Do you believe it inhabited?' I asked. 'Why not?' he said. 'Then why not, as this world, by sinners: and if by sinners, by souls crying for redemption in ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hand, was bordered by a high rail fence, along which rose, here and there, the bleak spire of a ghostly and perishing Lombardy poplar. This is the tree of all least suited to those wind-beaten regions, but none other will the country people plant. Close up to the road, at one point, curved a massive sweep of red dike, and ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... veterinary officer in the cellar of the school-house which stood beside the church. The latter, which had been used by the Germans as a C.C.S., was a modern building and of good proportions. The spire had been used as an observation-post. One or two shells had hit the building and the interior, though still intact, was in great disorder. The altar ornaments, vestments, and prayer books were thrown about in confusion. The school-house where I was lodged ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... to yourselves: "I am in the right. Here, and here alone, lies man's part. I am entering on a path, beaten and worn, but straight; I shall cross the weary downs, but each step will bring me nearer the village spire. I am not wandering through life, I am marching on, I stir with my feet the dust in which my father has planted his. My child, on the same road, will find the traces of my footsteps, and, perhaps, on seeing that I have not faltered, will say: 'Let me act like my old father and not ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... cypressus thyoides, the wild pine, with two or three other sorts of pine less common. The two first make up almost two-thirds of the whole; and, at a distance, might be mistaken for the same tree, as they both run up into pointed spire-like tops, but they are easily distinguished on coming nearer from their colour, the cypress being of a much paler green, or shade, than the other. The trees, in general, grow with great vigour, and are all ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... an age; then the scientist pointed with a weak and trembling hand where a towering spire of metallic gray leaned slowly in the air. So slowly it moved, to the eyes of the watchers—a great arc of gathering force and speed that shattered ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... out over the low sill and stood on the leads. The night was soft and cool. The sky, full of the light of a rising moon, shewed beautifully, against its luminous violet, the outlines of dome and minaret and spire, and far out beyond the crowded city's confines, the two incomparable mountains, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the huge volcanoes, shrouded in eternal snow, rising a sheer ten thousand feet from the level plain, standing like ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... in alcohol. The outer shell, when it is spiral, should be broken at the upper part, and at several points of the spire, to let the liquor run in, so that the whole animal may be preserved; it is possible, following this indication, to have shell-fish in such order, that they may be dissected, even after being a very ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... Gothic times, be reflected in it. Alas! this evening my style flows not at all. Flow, then, into this smoke-colored goblet, thou blood of the Rhine! out of thy prison-house,—out of thy long-necked, tapering flask, in shape not unlike a church-spire among thy native hills; and, from the crystal belfry, loud ring the merry tinkling bells, while I drink a health to my hero, in whose heart is sadness, and in whose ears the bells of Andernach ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... which bids them farewell—I saw the sun shining on it in the fall of last year, and heard the sweet village choir raising anthems round about. What boots whether it be Westminster or a little country spire which covers your ashes, or if, a few days sooner or later, the world ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... top of the hill, beyond the cleft of the river Avon, he could see the smoke and the church towers of the town of Bristol, and beyond it, the slime of the water of the Bristol Channel; and nearer, on one side, the spire of Elmwood Church looked up, and, on the other, the woods round Elmwood House, and these ran out as it were, lengthening and narrowing into a wooded cleft or gulley, Hermit's Gulley, which broke the side of the hill just below where Steadfast stood, and had a little clear ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cattle. In the midst of this lawn was raised a terrace, a man's height, and covered with such beautiful cement, that the whole pavement seemed to be but one single stone, most highly polished. A temple was erected in the middle of this terrace, having a spire rising about fifty cubits high from the building, which might be seen for several leagues round. The temple was thirty cubits long, and twenty broad; built of red marble, highly polished. The inside of the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... sun shone through it with red rayless countenance. But before we reached the church, which was some three miles from home, the fog was gone, and the frost had taken shelter with the shadows; the sun was dazzling without being clear, and the golden cock on the spire was glittering keen in the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Round the old grey spire in the evening calm, No more they circle in sportive glee, Hearing the hum of the vesper psalm, And the swell of the organ so far below; But far, far away, over land and sea, In the still ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... a scene!—Can this be Venice? No. And yet methinks it is—because I see Amid the lumps of yellow, red, and blue Something which looks like a Venetian spire. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of man, or of his works, was there. The setting sun that cast such a gorgeous flood of light upon this exquisite panorama, bringing out some of these lofty islands in strong relief, and casting others into intense shade, shed no cheery beam upon church spire or cottage pane. We beheld the landscape, savage and grand in its ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... she will, Mrs. Dr. dear," said Susan, after Miss Cornelia had gone. "She would stick at nothing, not even at shingling the church spire if she took it into her head. But I cannot understand how even Cornelia Bryant can talk to a minister as she does. You would think he ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... platform above the dining place, looking down upon the great chestnut tree, and indeed upon all our possessions. Thus endeavouring to realize the scenes so often seen in England, where the pretty simple church, with its graceful spire, is seen on an elevated place, while the humble cottages, and rose-covered houses clustered round ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Negro seek For gems hid in some forlorn creek, We all Pearls scorn, Save what the dewy morne Congeals upon each little spire of grasse, Which careless Shepherds beat down as they passe, And Gold ne're here appears Save what the ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... lay across the velvet sward of the Rectory lawn. The heat of the early June day had given place to the cool air of the evening. The exquisitely delicate colouring from the setting sun flooded the sky overhead and deepened into blues and purples behind the elms and the church spire. A deep peace had fallen upon the world except that from the topmost bough of the tallest elm tree a robin sang, pouring his very heart out in a song of ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... of this English Boston, and quite as sour as those who peopled the daughter-city in New England. Our parlor had the one recommendation of looking into the market-place, and affording a sidelong glimpse of the tail spire and noble old church. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and creaking noise on board, re-echoed from a hundred quarters. The water and all upon it was in active motion, dancing and buoyant and bubbling up; while the old grey Tower and piles of building on the shore, with many a church-spire shooting up between, looked coldly on, and seemed to disdain their ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... brow of which was a breast of pines. In front of the principal facade was a garden with a proclivity toward the lake, which was surrounded and sheltered by a belt of trees. In the distance the peasants' houses were seen, the tall clock spire of Aland, and far in the distance the chimneys of the furnace belonging to M. de Vermondans. At this moment, the plain, the snow-covered woods, the frozen lake presented one uniform color. Any one, however, might see they would present beautiful ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... towers above us, and gleams like the shining cross on the top of some lofty cathedral spire, does not flash up there inaccessible, nor lie before us like some pathless precipice, up which nothing that has not wings can ever hope to rise, but the height of the love of Christ is an hospitable height, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... knew we ought to feel its grandeur, but somehow we did not. Then we sat down by the Holy of Holies, and there we were startled into a better judgment by the astounding fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul—the largest edifice in Great Britain—could stand upright, spire, dome, body, and all, inside of St. Peter's! that the letters of the inscription which run around the base of the dome, though apparently but an inch, are in reality six feet high! Then, for the first time, the scales fell from ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... army, were at least in some way in touch with what was happening elsewhere. Even in that first month of the war it seemed callous to be breathing the sweet, clear air of Braemar, or to let one's eyes linger on the matchless beauty of mountain and glen. The grey spire of my church rising gracefully among the silver birches and the dark firs, bosomed deep in purple hills, pointed to some harder way than that. Stevenson, who wrote part of Treasure Island here, called it 'the wale (pick) of Scotland,' but just because it was so we saw more ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... till it reached the bright blue dancing ocean, over which several white sails were skimming rapidly. Inland there was a beautifully diversified country. There were several rich woods surrounding gentlemen's seats, and here and there a hamlet and a church spire rising up among the trees, and some extensive homesteads, the gems of an English rural landscape; and there were wide pasture lands, and ploughed fields already getting a green tinge from the rising corn, and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... fall; a tree 30-70 feet high, reduced at great elevations to a height of 1-2 feet, or to a shrub; trunk 1-3 feet in diameter, straight, slender; branches very irregular or in indistinct whorls, for the most part nearly horizontal; often ending in long spire-like shoots; branchlets numerous, head conical, symmetrical while the tree is young, especially when growing in open swamps; when old extremely variable, occasionally with contorted or drooping limbs; foliage pale green, turning to a dull ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... very refreshing; and it is Sunday, and we have got away from the wicked for an hour or two; but in England there would be a little white church out yonder, and a spire like an angel's forefinger pointing from the grass to heaven, and the lads in their clean smock-frocks like snow, and the wenches in their white stockings and new shawls, and the old women in their scarlet cloaks and black bonnets, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... golden plains. A mountain chipmunk stared at him, flicked its tail, and dived under a flat ledge; a bird whose real home was a thousand miles off in the north faced the upland breeze and sang in its unknown tongue. Jim drew still nearer the rocky spire, rounded a ledge, and faced an unexpected sight. In a little open lodge of willows, bent and roofed with a canvas cover, sat an Indian youth, alone, motionless, beside him was a pot of water, and between him ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... I was gray and old; Unwedded, alone in the world, Finding brothers and sisters in the congregation, And children in the church. I know they laughed and thought me queer. I knew of the eagle souls that flew high in the sunlight, Above the spire of the church, and laughed at the church, Disdaining me, not seeing me. But if the high air was sweet to them, sweet was the church to me. It was the vision, vision, vision of the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... wits. This inactivity was death. The escaping air hissed in my ears. Our precious air, escaping away into the vacant desolation of the Lunar emptiness. Through one of the twisted, slanting dome windows a rocky spire was visible. The Planetara lay bow down, wedged in a jagged cradle of Lunar rock. A miracle that the hull and dome ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... one must understand that St. Michael's is to Charleston, socially, what St. George's, Hanover Square, is to London. A beautiful old building, surrounded by a historic burial ground and surmounted by a delicate white spire containing fine chimes, it strongly suggests the architectural touch of Sir Christopher Wren; but it is not by Wren, for he died a number of years before 1752, when the cornerstone of St. Michael's was laid. When ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... hasten his beast, who was picking his way delicately through the filth and tumbled stones that lay everywhere, for the melodious roar seemed to be bidding him haste and be welcome. Mr. Morris was close beside him, and remarked on this and that as they went, the spire of St. Ann's away to the right, with St. Pancras's Bridge, a swinging sign over an inn with Queen Katharine's face erased, but plainly visible under Ann Boleyn's, the tall mound beyond the Priory crowned by a Calvary, and the roof ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... easily discerned, of a reversal in the fates of two nations. The steeples and turrets of Montreal, the old windmill, the belfry and high-pitched roof of Notre Dame de Bonsecours, the massed buildings of the Seminary and the Hotel Dieu, the spire of the Jesuits, rose against the green shaggy slopes of the mountain, and over the mountain the sky paled tranquilly toward evening. Sky, mountain, forests, mirrored belfry and broad rolling river—a permanent peace seemed to rest ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cloudless blue sky rose the pinnacles of Santa Croce, the domes of San Spirito, of the Baptistery, of the Cathedral; sharply defined in the clear atmosphere were the airy, light Campanile of Giotto, the more slender brown tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the spire of Santa Maria Novella. Northward beyond the city rose the heights of Fiesole, and to the east the green hills dotted all over with white houses, swept away ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... have witnessed a part. He was stationed on horseback, upon one of the mountains of Salces, north of the city; from this point he could see the plain of Roussillon before him, sloping to the Mediterranean. Perpignan, with its ramparts of brick, its bastions, its citadel, and its spire, formed upon this plain an oval and sombre mass on its broad and verdant meadows; the vast mountains surrounded it, and the valley, like an enormous bow curved from north to south, while, stretching its white line in the east, the sea looked like its silver cord. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... admiration of the traveller! The castle was, to my eye, of all castles which I had seen, the most elevated in its situation, and the most difficult of access. The clouds of heaven seemed to be resting upon its battlements. But what do I see yonder? "Is it the top of the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral?" "It is, Sir," replied the postilion. I pulled off my travelling cap, by way of doing homage; and as I looked at my watch, to know the precise time, found it was just ten o'clock. It was worth making a minute of. Yet, owing to the hills ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... since Mr. Wharton and his brother-in-law built their cabins in the wilderness. Those cabins were now sheds and kitchens appended to larger and more commodious dwellings. A village had grown up around them. On the spire of a new meeting-house a gilded fish sailed round from north to south, to the great admiration of children in the opposite schoolhouse. The wild-flowers of the prairie were supplanted by luxuriant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the promontory. Don't you remember the spire rising among the trees, as we see it from ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there be the least spark of the former it will turn all the rest into its own bright substance. Here is the stifling smoke, coming up from some newly-lighted fire of green wood, black and choking, and solid in its coils; but as the fire burns up, all the smoke-wreaths will be turned into one flaming spire, full of light and warmth. Do you turn your smoke into fire, your fear into faith. Do not be down-hearted if it takes a while to convert the whole of the lower and baser into the nobler and higher. Faith and fear do blend, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Ambulant, undulant drapery, Vaguery and strangely provocative, Fluttersd and beckons. O, yonder - Is it?—the gleam of a stocking! Sudden, a spire Wedged in the mist! O, the houses, The long lines of lofty, grey houses, Cross-hatched with shadow and light! These are the streets . . . Each is an ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... John and Jane, to Fred and Frank, To Theodore and Mary, To Willie and to Reginald, To Louis, Sue and Gary; To sturdy boys and merry girls, And all the dear young people Who live in towns, or live on farms, Or dwell near spire or steeple; To boys who work, and boys who play, Eager, alert and ready, To girls who meet each happy day With faces sweet and steady; To dearest comrades, one and all, To Harry, Florrie, Kate, To children small, and children ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... had issued, to kneel once more, and then ascended to Heaven; before playhouses, parks, and palaces, wondrous resorts of wit, pleasure and splendour; before Shakespeare's resting-place under the tall spire which rises by Avon, amidst the sweet Warwickshire pastures; before Derby, and Falkirk, and Culloden, where the cause of honour and loyalty had fallen, it might be to rise no more: before all these points in their pilgrimage there was one which ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... child." "Who's Mike?" my brother growled A little roughly. Quoth the fisherman— "Mike, Sir? he's just a fisher lad, no more; But he can sing, when he takes on to sing, So loud there's not a sparrow in the spire But needs must hear. Sir, if I might make bold, I'd ask what song that was you sung. My mate, As we were shoving off the mackerel boats, Said he, 'I'll wager that's the sort o' song They kept their hearts up ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... desecrated that the traveller might pass it by without notice, but withal retaining the massive piers and arches of the first half of the eleventh century. There is Evreux, with its Norman naves, its tall slender Gothic choir, its strange Italian western tower, and almost more fantastic central spire. All these are noble churches, sharing with those of our own land a certain sobriety and architectural good sense which is often wanting in the churches of France proper. In Normandy as in England, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... was a Gothic building, which would have been sufficiently handsome if built in stone, but with barbarous taste had been executed in wood. At the end of the garden some more steps led to a broad, four-cornered courtyard, on the right of which the iron spire of the National Memorial was dimly visible, while to the left was a large building of red and yellow brick with a four-square tower at either end, a pavilion projecting from the center, and a number of large windows. Over the entrance in the center of the building was the inscription in gold ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... lay the grey city wrapped in its veil of smoke, the tall spire of the old church rising in picturesque isolation above the line of the surrounding buildings. It seemed at that moment to stand as a symbol of the life of the Mother Country, a life fenced in by convention, by forms and ceremonies sanctified to every Englishman by centuries of association; ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... afraid!" cried the Goblin, "she's only rolling a little;" and, as he said this, the clock steadied itself and sailed serenely away past the spire of the village church ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... Many of them had lawns and gardens as at Albany, and the best were planted with rows of trees which would afford a fine shade in warm weather. Above the mercantile houses and dwellings rose the lofty spire of St. George's Chapel in Nassau Street, which had been completed less than three years before, and which secured Robert's admiration ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 'There's Hollingford church-spire,' said she presently, as they drew near the town, and caught a glimpse of the church through the trees. 'I think I never wish to go out ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fire; how it fractures the rock, softens obdurate metals, envelopes the prairies in flame, and how it seized upon the seats, ceiling and roof in his darling house of worship, thence fiercely ascending the spire to strive to rise still higher, and invade the clouds. From this he turned to the doctrine of submission, in a manner so earnest and pathetic that a perceptible agitation pervaded the audience, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... attended high mass in the great Cathedral of Strasbourg, and was surprised and pleased at the sight of 10,000 soldiers, in review order, drawn up within its walls. It was tiresome enough work mounting to the top of the spire, (which I ascertained, by the steps I took, to be exactly 490 feet high, Strasbourg measure; and this is exactly eight feet higher than St. Peter's at Rome), but I made it out, notwithstanding the sulky looks of the jackanapes who lives at the top. Nothing can surpass the beauty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... descends by gentle steps to the plain, and forms natural terraces, clothed with walnut and chestnut trees, entwined with clusters of the creeping vine. In the midst of this wild, luxuriant vegetation, one sees here and there some country-house shining through the trees, the tall spire of a humble village, or the old dark towers and battlements of some castle of a bygone age. The plain was once a vast lake, and has preserved the hollowed form, the indented shores, and advanced promontories of its former aspect; but in lieu of the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the world of life, picture to yourselves ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Church spire had suddenly fallen to the ground, it could scarcely have surprised and startled him more than his own ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... 27th of July this year, London was visited by the most violent thunderstorm which had been experienced for many summers. It lasted for several hours. The fine spire of the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields was struck by ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court-week,—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... found in the sacred architecture of the time. The style of architecture first employed was the Romanesque, characterized by the rounded arch and the dome; but towards the close of the twelfth century this was superseded by the Gothic, distinguished by the pointed arch, the tower or the slender spire, and rich ornamentation. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... It was laid out in the old French style, with straight walks, pyramids of box, and white painted stone figures: satyrs and goddesses peeped through the green foliage. You now caught sight of a high tower with a spire; and soon the whole of the old mansion presented itself to view. The water was conveyed away from the broad moats, where the weeping willows with bowed heads and uncovered roots stood in the warm sunshine. ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... sale in the bazaar;— Where the Great Wall round China goes, And on one side the desert blows, And with bell and voice and drum, Cities on the other hum;— Where are forests, hot as fire, Wide as England, tall as a spire, Full of apes and cocoa-nuts And the negro hunters' huts;— Where the knotty crocodile Lies and blinks in the Nile, And the red flamingo flies Hunting fish before his eyes;— Where in jungles, near and far, Man-devouring tigers are, Lying close and giving ear Lest the hunt be drawing near, Or a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we never see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns. It was the Abbey of Osney. It would have been his landmark, as Hereford is the landmark for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the new spire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channel past Bisham upon a rising tide. And as he passed beneath it (for, of the many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he would have seen a great and ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... incident was an unfavorable omen, and would discourage his men. He cast about in his mind for a means of retaliation. Far over the roofs of the city rose a tapering spire, that of the cathedral in the Upper Town. On this spire, the devout Catholics of the French city had hung a picture of the Holy Family as an invocation of Divine aid. Through his spy-glass, Phipps could see that some strange object hung ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... a trace of vegetation exists along the sea-board from Persian to Indian frontier. Occasionally, at long intervals, a mud hut is seen, just showing that the country is inhabited, and that is all. The steep, rocky cliffs, with their sharp, spire-like summits rising almost perpendicularly out of the blue sea, are typical of the desert ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... cities the presence of this significant landmark is almost invariable. There is ever the lone and lorn tower, belfry, or spire painted in dark sad colours, seen from afar off, rising from the decayed little town below; often of some antique, original shape that pleases, and yet with a gloomy misanthropical air, as of total abandonment. They are rusted and abrased. ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... difficult to avoid the view of this solitary and egotistic peak, the highest in Styria. He was assigned a comfortable chamber, but the night was too fine for bed. He did not feel sleepy, and he went along the road he had come by; the church was an opaque mass, the spire alone showing in the violet twilight, like some supernatural spar on a ship far out at sea. He attempted to conjure to his tired brain the features, the expression, of the girl. They would not reappear; ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... flat; the walls, almost destitute of windows, are rough with unhewn stones; and many of the houses lie half buried under the rocky mountain side. These are without numbers as the streets are without names. Here, moreover, rises no village spire to point the thoughts of men heavenward; no church bell rings out its merry festal peals, or tolls the march to the grave; no sundial marks the succession of the hours which pass by unheeded all, save those of morning, noon, and evening; and in no public school-house ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... the cause of so much sorrow could never be found, and the Indians believe that it was taken away by the spirits of Kos-su'-kah and Tee-hee'-nay. In memory of them, and of this tragedy, the slender spire of rock [sometimes called "The Devil's Thumb"] that rises heavenward near the top of the cliff at this point is known among the Indians as ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... to have puzzled last century writers greatly, for they wrote it "Jermyn," "Germain," "Germaine," and even "Germin." St. James's Church, Wren's handiwork, is all that remains from the age of Anne, with "the steeple," says Strype, fondly, "lately finished with a fine spire, which adds much splendor to this end of the town, and also serves as a landmark." Perhaps it sometimes served as a landmark to Richard Steele, reeling happily to the home in "Berry" Street, where his beloved Prue awaited him. St. James's Square has gone through many metamorphoses ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... scene of my youth! [2] Seat of Friendship and Truth, Where Love chas'd each fast-fleeting year; Loth to leave thee, I mourn'd, For a last look I turn'd, But thy spire was ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants got so much into ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cruel and cold, as the shelterless know; Huddled in nooks on the mud or the flags, Wrapp'd in a few scanty, fluttering rags. Gently it rests on the roof and the spire, And filling the streets with its slush and the mire, Freezing the life out of poor, starving souls, Wild whirling and drifting as Boreas howls. Hard is their lot who have no where to go, To shelter from storm and the ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... ye out a walie hammer; About the knottit buttress clam'er; Alang the steep roof stoyt an' stammer, A gate mis-chancy; On the aul' spire, the bells' hie cha'mer, ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of this low, and more or less level wood, rose three separate stems that shot up and soared into the sky like a lighthouse out of the waves or a church spire out of the village roofs. They formed a clump of three columns close together, which might well be the mere bifurcation, or rather trifurcation, of one tree, the lower part being lost or sunken in the thick wood ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... worldliness, that interlace and constitute the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day, while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the town a ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of countless bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn, and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city, releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering in the fountains, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... St. Stiff the Martyr is calling to service, as it is wont to do at all times and hours—for mysterious purposes but little known:—it seems as if the bell disliked its little wooden cottage, on the unfinished spire; or was inspired, or in a towering passion to live in a tower, or saw no fun in waiting for funds; and so, continually pealed an appeal to the public:—however, it was a puny, little, curious bell, with a tongue of its own, now clacking for a charity sermon; and, curiously, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... them, the undulating slope and shimmering loch, the wide moors and softly rounded hills, the dark green masses of ragged firs, and the great white Bens in the far distance, and below them, in the midst the human touch, in a nestling village with its Heaven-pointing spire. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... nothing. I may be lightning, to be sure; or the Protestants may have had it down for Popery; but methinks they would have too much Christian regard for poor mariners than to knock down the only landmark on this coast till you come to Nissard spire.' Then he hailed the man at the mast-head, demanding if he saw the steeple of La Sablerie. 'No, no, sir.' But as other portions of the land became clearer, there was no doubt that the THROSTLE was ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and glittering shaft Shot 'thwart the earth! In crown of living fire Up comes the day! As if they, conscious, quaff'd The sunny flood, hill, forest, city, spire, Laugh in the wakening light. Go, vain Desire! The dusky lights have gone; go thou thy way! And pining Discontent, like them expire! Be called my chamber Peace, when ends the day, And let me, with the dawn, like Pilgrim, sing and pray. Great ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... evening. I left the cars with my head full of the cathedral. The first thing I saw, on lifting my eyes, was a brown spire. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... synagogue; and just beyond it St. Sophia, the ugly Greek cathedral, yellow, squat, and ponderous; and midway between these two—a thing of beauty—St. Matthew's Church, grey and Gothic, with its slender soaring spire. In Pembridge Square she paused to ask herself if it was not time to turn back. No, not yet, a few steps more would bring her to the old turning—that broad familiar way only as long as the width of two houses with their gardens, from which she might look for a few ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... still older church, with its reverend screen of trees, and slowly ascending a hill side, from whence he obtained enchanting peeps of the spire and college of Harrow, he reached the cluster of well-built houses which constitute the village of Neasdon. From this spot a road, more resembling the drive through a park than a public thoroughfare, led him gradually to the brow of Dollis Hill. It was a serene and charming evening, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was that the place was tenantless, till I caught sight of a thin spire of smoke struggling against the downpour. I hoped to come on some gardener or groom from whom I could seek direction, so I skirted the pleasance to find the kitchen door. A glow of fire in one of the rooms cried welcome to my shivering ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... rough, scraggy yellow birch, on a bank of club-moss, so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining leaves,—with here and there in the bordering a spire of the false wintergreen (Pyrola rotundifolia) strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of a May orchard,—that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I recline to note what transpires. The sun is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... have been a beautiful landscape. There was a sloping lawn, a fine stream winding at the foot of it, and a tract of park beyond, with noble clumps of trees, and herds of deer. At a distance was a neat hamlet, with the smoke from the cottage chimneys hanging over it; and a church with its dark spire in strong relief against the clear cold sky. The house was surrounded with evergreens, according to the English custom, which would have given almost an appearance of summer; but the morning was extremely frosty; the light vapour of the preceding evening had been precipitated by the cold, ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... beach, perhaps a hundred yards or more from the cliffs, a number of huge rocks stood alone. I suppose at some time they must have slipped from the mainland, but that was undoubtedly in the far-back past. One of them, I remember, was shaped like a spire, and seemed to look with derision on the foaming waters that sometimes nearly covered it, and at others left it standing ill all its majesty on ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... together picture, the critics said, and a new scene which in these days is much to be desired. The manner in which Lacroix had arranged to show both the exterior and interior of the church was a clever hit, every one agreed. Outside, with the clear blue sky for background, the spire of the church was clearly defined, and on a niche just above the main doorway stood an exquisitely carved statue of the patron St. Anne, holding by the hand her little daughter, the Blessed Virgin. And beyond the church and the ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... mental and bodily vigor. As yet their children all remain at home, as the boys find ample employment upon the farm, and at the mill; while Jennette assists her mother in the labours of the household. For many years the setting sun has rested upon the gleaming spire of the neat and substantial church erected by the settlers; and now upon the Sabbath day, instead of listening to a sermon read by a neighbour, they listen to the regular preaching of the gospel, and each one according to his means contributes to the support of their ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... arch, which they still show with admiration. The front proper has a big door, barred strongly, as if the church might have been in piratical times a place of refuge for the population up in the hills. To the right of the entrance is the tower, which is buttressed, and its spire is made of blue and colored tiles, which have thoroughly kept their colors. A bell in this tower may have rung the inhabitants to church when Columbus announced that he meant to impress the Palos people to assist him in his voyage. I entered the church, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... severe judgment to possess some of the defects of the late Flemish style, it is rivaled for beauty of outline only by the flamboyant steeples of Chartres and Vienna. As might be expected from its late age—it was not finished until 1530—this northwestern spire of Notre Dame at Antwerp exhibits some extravagances in design and detail, but the mode in which the octagonal lantern of openwork bisects the faces of the solid square portion with its alternate angles, thus breaking the outline without any harsh or disagreeable ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... plants whose leaves do not spread and grow large, but rather spire upward and grow tall; these plants they do not tend, not being worth their labor."—Mr. Clayton's Letter to the Royal Society, 1688. Miscellanea Curiosa, vol. iii., ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... A young moon was rising over the city, throwing out in dark relief against the sky a hundred steeples and domes. The long, thin spire of the Fortress Church—the tomb of the Romanoffs—shot up into the heavens like a dagger. Near at hand, a thousand electric lights and colored lanterns, cunningly swung on the branches of the pines, made a veritable fairyland. The ceaseless song of the skates, on ice as hard as iron, mingled ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... atoning for its spring thinness and scantiness by a vivid energy of colour; while straight across the court, beyond the rich patchwork of the roofs and the picturesque outlines of the chimneys, a delicate piece of white stone-work rose into air—the spire of one of Wren's churches, as dainty, as perfect, and as fastidiously balanced as the hand ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... another environment, how different might it not appear,—as for instance placed beside Amiens, where in one particular alone, the mere height of nave and choir, it immediately dwindles into insignificance. Under such conditions its graceful spire becomes dwarfed and attenuated. Need more be said?—The writer thinks not, since the present work does not deal with the comparative merits of any two cathedrals or of national types; but the suggestion should serve to ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Stirling, in his Annals of Spanish Artists, says, that of no prince are recorded more sayings which show a refined taste and a quick eye. He told the Burghers of Antwerp that, "the light and soaring spire of their cathedral deserved to be put under a glass case." He called Florence "the Queen of the Arno, decked for a perpetual holiday." He regretted that he had given his consent for the conversion of the famous mosque of Abderahman at Cordova into a cathedral, when he saw ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... flame shot up in the east above the forest, but unlike the others did not go out again; it hung there a red spire, blood-red against the sky, and grew taller ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... story that transformed the world. I awoke shortly after midnight, after seeing the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, with these words floating backward and forward in my head like a peal of bells from some distant spire. Backward and forward they went and came, and ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... so clearly expresses its purpose that a definition of style promptly suggests the title of Horticultural Architecture. Its decorative spire-like finials resemble the cypress and poplar. The clusters of floral ornaments and festoons reflect one of the fundamental purposes of decorative glory to which all plant life has been decreed. The bulblike glass dome is ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... grinning, from his box; and in the lighted doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and apron, waiting to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would be the bright fire, the cheerful supper table, the soft bed ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... commenced to appear at more frequent intervals now, and took on a character a little different from the old weather-grayed dwellings of the open country. There showed a white, slim church spire above the trees. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... walk on the other side of the wood, that overlooked the pleasant slope of the meadows beyond; the walk had probably been made to command this sunny, peaceful landscape, with trees, and a church spire, two or three red-tiled roofs of old cottages, and a purple bit of rising ground in the distance; and at some previous date, when there might have been a large family of Hamleys residing at the hall, ladies in hoops, and gentlemen in bag- wigs with swords ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... roof by Abbot Islip, who witnessed the erection of Henry VII.'s Chapel. Two hundred and thirty years afterwards Sir Christopher Wren restored Islip's work, and designed the upper portions. The edifice is not yet complete, as the square central tower requires a lofty spire to complete it. ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... little while the river curved again, sweeping back to its original course. Suddenly, in the distance, the bright spire of the Settlement church came into view, and then the familiar cottages. Mandy Ann's laughing face grew grave, as she saw how very, very far away they looked. They took on, also, from the distance, a certain strangeness which smote her heart. This wonderful adventure ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... failings, and a laudable desire that others, at least, should profit by the teachings we neglect. Perhaps," he continued, closing his eyes dreamily, "there is not a man here who does not recall the happy days of his boyhood, the rustic village spire, the lessons shared with some artless village maiden, with whom he later sauntered, hand in hand, through the woods, as the simple ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... the new church was built; and some twenty years later, when Dr. Corrie, Archdeacon of Calcutta, was consecrated first Bishop of Madras, the church became 'the Cathedral Church of St. George.' St. George's Cathedral is a stately building, with a spire 139 feet high, and it stands in spacious grounds. The total cost was more than two lakhs of rupees; but nobody had to be asked to subscribe, for the money was available from a peculiar source. It was ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... the dark shaft of the tower whence the bell had rung its warning, at the dusky mass of the Capitol, at the spire of St. Paul's, and then down at a flickering figure passing rapidly on the other side of the street. Robert's eyes were keen, and a soldier's life had accustomed him to their use in the darkness. He caught only ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Corydalis claviculata, if you look to one leaf, may be called a tendril-bearer; if you look to another leaf it may be called a leaf-climber. Now I am sure I remember some cases with plants in which important parts such as the position of the ovule differ: differences in the spire of leaves on lateral and terminal ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... there is no sign of anything but peace and pleasant life in the surroundings. But these black-clad women do know—know that the cool green clump of trees over on the hill-side hides a roofless ruin with fire-blackened walls; that the church spire that for all their lives they had seen out there over the sky-line is no longer visible because it lies shell-smitten to a tumbled heap of brick and stone and mortar; that the glint of white wood and spot of ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... when he left the park, and crossed the Hampstead Road into a dreary region of dwellings crowded and commonplace as the thoughts of a worshipper of Mammon, houses upon houses, here and there shepherded by a tall spire, it was hard to believe that the spring was indeed coming ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... highway descends slowly to the village of Ecclefechan, the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which clothe a hill beyond. I soon enter the main street of the village, which in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the center of it. This has been covered ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... build an imposing house. He had the stones gathered from the lands and used in building houses for his people. The seigneur's mill was one of the best. A fine church raised its cross-crowned spire near by. A brewery, built of stone, was in full operation. The land was fertile and produced abundant harvests. When Catalogne visited Longueuil in 1712 he noted that the habitants were living in comfortable circumstances, by reason of the large expenditures which the seigneur had made to improve ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... gorgeous sycamore! Oft hath the holy wine and bread Been blest beneath thy murmuring tent, Where many a bright and hoary head Bowed at that awful sacrament. Now all beneath the turf are laid On which they sat, and sang, and prayed. Above that consecrated tree Ascends the tapering spire, that seems To lift the soul up silently To heaven with all its dreams, While in the belfry, deep and low, From his heaved bosom's purple gleams The dove's continuous murmurs flow, A dirge-like song, half bliss, half woe, The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... perfectly silent again. The evening now seemed so cool and fresh that the boys forgot their fatigue, and kept on chatting and planning for future excursions till they reached the gates of the Grange, just as the sun ceased to gild the weathercock at the top of the church spire. ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... exulting nation's shout Swelled on the breeze of victory through our streets, But yesterday—our banners flaunted out Like flowers the south wind woos from their retreats; Flowers of the nation, blue, and white, and red, Waving from balcony, and spire, and mast; Which told us that war's wintry storm had fled, And spring was more than ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... spiral, and deeply hollowed out on one side; but examples of this group are both of older and of more modern date. Another very extensive genus, especially in America, is Platyceras (fig. 72, a and f), with its thin fragile shell—often hardly coiled up at all—its minute spire, and its widely-expanded, often sinuated mouth. The British Acroculioe should probably be placed here, and the group has with reason been regarded as allied to the Violet-snails (Ianthina) of the open Atlantic. The species of Platyostoma (fig. 72, h) also belong ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... two pine cones, a trident, a thyrsus tied around with two ribbons with the ends pendant, a thumb and two fingers. The caduceus again the conspicuous part of the sacred Triad Ashur is symbolized by a single stone placed upright,—the stump of a tree, a block, a tower, a spire, minaret, pole, pine, poplar or ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... alternating with Peggy in riding Star the rest of the journey was passed. They came into Lancaster the next day, the tall spire of the court-house with the two faces of its clock being the first thing to be spied. The town swarmed with soldiers. It seemed to Peggy that there was one on every corner. In truth Lancaster was in fair way toward being a military camp. The Americans found much difficulty in disposing ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Magnolia, [6] spread High as a cloud, high over head! The Cypress and her spire, Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam [7] Cover a hundred leagues and seem To set the ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... under the shadow of the spire of St. Giles's, in the pavement between that old cathedral church and the County Hall, the passer-by will mark the figure of a heart let into the causeway, and know that he is standing on the "Heart of Midlothian," [Footnote: The title of one of Sir Walter Scott's romances.] the site of the old ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... day in April when he and Gascoyne rode clattering out through Temple Bar, leaving behind them quaint old London town, its blank stone wall, its crooked, dirty streets, its high-gabled wooden houses, over which rose the sharp spire of St. Paul's, towering high into the golden air. Before them stretched the straight, broad highway of the Strand, on one side the great houses and palaces of princely priests and powerful nobles; on the other the Covent Garden, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... sober classical style. The Church consists of a Greek square, continued at the east end into a semicircular tribune, surmounted by a central cupola, and flanked by a detached bell-tower, ending in a pyramidal spire. The whole is built of solid yellow travertine, a material which, by its warmth of colour, is pleasing to the eye, and mitigates the mathematical severity of the design. Upon entering, we feel at once what Alberti called the music of this style; its large and simple ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... village marked with little spire, Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame, There dwells, in lowly shed and mean attire, A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name, Who boasts unruly brats ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... France, and the proposed experiment was actually performed in the presence of the king. Before the report, however, of the successful experiment reached Franklin he had himself verified his theory, using a kite to attain an altitude, as there was no spire or high building in Philadelphia. Taking his son with him, he went to an old cow house in the country, before a storm, and there, to catch the electric fluid, sent up his kite made of an old silk handkerchief. A wire extended from the upright stick of the kite, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... mind was for some time; but it's many years ago, when I was first made boatswain of a corvette (during this conversation he was looking through the telescope); yes, there it is," said he; "I have it in the field. Look, Mr Simple, do you see a small church, with a spire of glazed tiles, shining ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... sinking from the world, the thought came upon him that she was his sun, and the glory that she shed over his life might soon pass away into the bosom of the "ever-during Dark." But against the clouds rose one of the many spires that characterize the town of Bruges; and on that spire, tapering into heaven, rested the eyes of Gertrude Vane. The different objects that caught the gaze of each was emblematic both of the different channel of their thoughts and the different elements of their nature: he thought of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... You see the approaching stranger, and the mysterious conversation grows more and more interesting. Emmaus rises in the distance, in the likeness of a New England village, with a white meeting house and spire. You follow the travellers; you enter the house with them; nor do you wake from your trance until, with streaming eyes, the preacher tells you that "they saw it was the Lord Jesus—and what a pity it was they could not have ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Georgian princess, of Metivier's disappearance from Moscow, and of how some German fellow had been brought to Rostopchin and accused of being a French "spyer" (so Count Rostopchin had told the story), and how Rostopchin let him go and assured the people that he was "not a spire at all, but only ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and flying buttresses and all the rest of it so as to keep them from falling. Look at those," he added, pointing at the skyscrapers before him, "they're not afraid to stand by themselves; they mean something, they have a use, while a spire just sticks straight up, pointing at nothing and being of no service unless it is to hang bells in a belfry. I don't care what people say about those crazy old tumble-down buildings of the Middle Ages, they may be beautiful and all that, but ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and man. It cannot be secured in a moment. As the edifice is erected by diligently laying one stone upon another, until it finally becomes a splendid temple, piercing the heavens with its glittering spire, so a good name must be built up by good deeds, faithfully and constantly performed, as day after day carries us along amid the ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... to our great St. Paul's, so buried in the heart of the city, amid the roar and din of commerce. And how different the smoky atmosphere in which the great Dome is enshrouded, to the clear, bright air of Milan, where every delicate spire, every graceful projection with its play of light and shadow, is seen to perfection, and the pure whiteness of the marble is unsullied by the soot and dirt which form, alas! a complete veil to our own Cathedral! What aspect, I thought, would the fairy-like Dome of Milan present after a winter ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... quivering ripple behind it. Farther down, springing from between two clumps of trees, might be seen the span of a light and elegant arch, from under which the river gently wound away to the right; and beyond this, on the left, about a hundred yards from the bank, rose up the slender spire of the parish church, out of the bosom of the old beeches that overshadowed it, and threw a solemn gloom upon the peaceful graveyard at its side. About two hundred yards again to the right, in a little green shelving dell beneath the ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... spot, where Science holds her reign, How joyous once I join'd thy youthful train! Bright in idea gleams thy lofty spire, Again I mingle with thy playful quire. * * * * * * * My wonted haunts, my scenes of joy and woe, Each early boyish friend, or youthful foe; Our feuds dissolved, but not my friendship past, I bless the former, and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... of th'age of —- yeares, was last incumbent there, but not resident, since anno reg. xxvij who sold his interest to Mr Copley for viijli xi s. ij d. {26} At the west end of the building is a large massy tower, lately put into thorough repair, this is surmounted by an octagonal spire, 230 feet in height, and formed of wooden shingles carefully fitted together. The great bell of this church is the largest in the county, and weighs nearly a ton and a half: the whole peal, consisting of ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... broken, and in some places decayed entirely away. We considered it, however, a good road, and cantered over it, our sure-footed horses never once stumbling. Glad indeed, were we, to see the white spire of the Hilo church, and more glad to reach Mr. Coan's hospitable house, where hot baths and a good dinner in some degree enlivened us. Grandma was tired, but a night and day's rest made her quite herself again. We felt amply repaid for any amount of fatigue or discomfort, by ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... Persian embroidery, and Teuila took a green silk one, in which to appear before royalty. Long before we got to the village we could see the middle part of an immense native house rising up like a church spire. Mataafa's own house was the largest and finest I had ever seen, and there were others as large. Louis tried in vain to get an interpreter, but was fain to put up with Talolo, who nearly expired with fright and misery, for he could not speak the high chief ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... a church in This attractive little shire, He beheld a smallish urchin Shooting arrows at the spire; In a spirit of derision, "Look alive!" the eagle said; And, with infinite precision, Dropped a ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... empire, save the three countries which it had been beforehand agreed to accept. Louis kept all the provinces of Germany of which he was already in possession, and received besides, on the left bank of the Rhine, the towns of Mayence, Worms, and Spire, with the territory appertaining to them. Lothair, for his part, had the eastern belt of Gaul, bounded on one side by the Rhine and the Alps, on the other by the courses of the Meuse, the Saone, and the Rhone, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... been erected by them on the banks of the Bay of Quinte, in the township of Tyendinaga, or the Indian woods. It is of stone, with a handsome tin-covered spire, and replaces the original wooden edifice they had erected on their first landing, the first altar of their pilgrimage, which ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... monuments, and Arthur's Seat rising grandly beyond. Two or three bridges afford a level communication between the old town and the new, and Prince's street, the thoroughfare of the latter, forms a fine terrace along the northern edge of the ravine, passing midway the Scott monument, a superb spire of Gothic. This latter is perhaps the only commendable feature per se in the city—for the details of Edinburgh are notably poor, its pictorial effect arising solely from the very happy manner in which they are grouped, amphitheatre-like, around ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... in the fourteenth the Rhine witnessed the invention of artillery; and on its bank, at Strassburg, a printing-office was first established. In 1400 the famous cannon, fourteen feet in length, was cast at Cologne; and in 1472 Vindelin de Spire printed his Bible. A new world was making its appearance; and, strange to say, it was upon the banks of the Rhine that those two mysterious tools with which God unceasingly works out the civilization of man—the catapult and the book—war and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... day of the nuptials was fixed; a joyous company assembled at Burley on the Hill, the mansion of the bride's father, which, from one of the noblest terraces in the island, looks down on magnificent woods of beech and oak, on the rich valley of Catmos, and on the spire of Oakham. The father of the bridegroom was detained to London by indisposition, which was not supposed to be dangerous. On a sudden his malady took an alarming form. He was told that he had but a few hours to live. He received the intimation with tranquil ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... surname of Smith. He preceded his assistant, who, it was decided, should join him only on the last afternoon of his stay at Hammerpond. Now the village of Hammerpond is perhaps one of the prettiest little corners in Sussex; many thatched houses still survive, the flint-built church, with its tall spire nestling under the down, is one of the finest and least restored in the county, and the beech-woods and bracken jungles through which the road runs to the great house are singularly rich in what the vulgar artist and photographer call ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Walton, Norfolk; Ledbury, Herefordshire; and a very curious one entirely of timber, with the frame for the bells springing from the ground, at Pembridge, Herefordshire. At Salisbury a fine early English detached campanile, 200 feet in height, surmounted by a timber turret and spire, stood near the north-west corner of the cathedral, but was destroyed ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... around. Swift on the sedgy reeds the ruin preys; Along the margin winds the running blaze: The trees in flaming rows to ashes turn, The flowering lotos and the tamarisk burn, Broad elm, and cypress rising in a spire; The watery willows hiss before the fire. Now glow the waves, the fishes pant for breath, The eels lie twisting in the pangs of death: Now flounce aloft, now dive the scaly fry, Or, gasping, turn their bellies to the sky. At ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... The immense plantations of dark pines give it this sombre hue, but in reality the waters are clear as crystal. Beyond these groves, still looking south, you discover the woods about Wardour Castle, and amongst them the silvery gleam of another sheet of water. To the south-west is the giant spire of Salisbury, which since the fall of Fonthill Tower now reigns in solitary stateliness over these vast regions of down and desert. Stourton Tower presents itself to the north, whilst to the west, in the extreme distance, several high ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... the wind, to the parsonage of a little church near by and inquired for the minister, but was told by his wife that he had been gone for several weeks to a watering place in the mountains. The old woman ran on further, till she came to a great church whose majestic spire seemed to touch the clouds. A stately rectory was near. Soft music, mingled with merry voices, came out to her through the open doors. Awkwardly and tremblingly she went up the polished marble steps and rang. A servant ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... husband came back she told him what had happened. So he at once put on blue clothes, mounted a blue horse, and rode into the forest. He met the horse, dismounted, and began digging. At last he discovered a temple to Parwati, all of gold, with diamond pillars and a spire made of rubies. Inside was a statue of the goddess, and to it he prayed, saying, "I have houses and cottages, cattle and horses, money and goods of all kinds, but I am very sad because I have no son." The goddess pitied ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork. As the friends topped each rise which leads up to the Crystal Palace, they could see the dun clouds of London stretching along the northern skyline, with spire or dome breaking through the low-lying haze. The Admiral was in high spirits, for the morning post had brought good news ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church spire, the towers, in the distance.... A wrong turn is no hardship; it merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or some group of buildings. ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... the rear platform of the limited, across the widening distance, at a town passed a moment ago. A flourishing city, according to the prospectus; a commonplace aggregation of architecture, you say; respectable middle-class homes; time-serving cottages built on the same plan; a heaven-seeking spire; perhaps a work of art in library or townhall. You are rather glad that you have left it behind; rather certain that soon you will have rolled through ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... abroad, find themselves within the confines of the parish of St. Bride's, with its church built by Wren shortly after the great fire, and its queer pointed steeple, like a series of superimposed tabourets overtopped with a needle-like spire? ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Valley we come to the beautiful Tenaya Lake, and here the canyon terminates. A mile or two above the lake stands the grand Sierra Cathedral, a building of one stone, sewn from the living rock, with sides, roof, gable, spire and ornamental pinnacles, fashioned and finished symmetrically like a work of art, and set on a well-graded plateau about 9000 feet high, as if Nature in making so fine a building had also been careful that it should be finely seen. From every direction its peculiar form ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... spires and domes for all the world like some vast cathedral which taunts the soul with its aloofness. If, on some sunshiny afternoon you look up from the camp and see a ghost-moon hanging, no more than a foot above the highest spire, you must surely be "citified" if you do not pause to drink in its weird sublimity and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... of these monuments is that which tradition allots to Absalom, close to this other which we have just described. It consists of a solid square erection, bearing what, for want of a better name, I must call a spire, with curved sides, the sides curving inwards as they fall from the apex to the base. This spiral roof, too low and dumpy to be properly called a spire, is very strong, built with stones laid in circles flat on each other, the circles becoming smaller as they rise towards the top. Why Absalom ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... comprehensive view of it, because the woods approached so closely that the traveller came upon it almost unawares. From every other side the outlines of the Abbey were singularly beautiful. Here a small spire sharply cut the sky, or a graceful point of roof told of a chapel or high-pitched hall; there, half frowning, half friendly, a mass of creeper-clad, grey wall looked capable of withstanding a siege. In some places solid pieces of ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... Through what a thicket of currant-bushes, and rose-bushes, and lilacs, and snow-balls, the path winds from the porch to the little gate—is it not a most charming spot? Now look over the brow of the hill—there, you can see the spire of the village church; and if you will walk a few paces further to yonder green knoll, you will see a cluster of pretty dwellings, and comfortable farm-houses, scattered ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... some gap in the hedge, when I discovered one of the inhabitants in the next field, advancing toward the stile, of the same size with him whom I saw in the sea pursuing our boat. He appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple, and took about ten yards at every stride, as near as I could guess. I was struck with the utmost fear and astonishment, and ran to hide myself in the corn, whence I saw him at the top of the stile looking back into the next field, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... first dusky chalets of the hamlet of Bel-Oiseau straggled towards me, and it was music in my ears to hear the cattle blow and rattle in their stalls under the sleeping lofts as I passed outside in the moonlight. Five minutes more, and the great zinc onion on the spire of the church glistened towards me, and I was in the heart of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... level of society must get his lever under its foundation stones. Taking hold of the carved cornice will tear the roof off and lift it away from the building, but raising the lowest stone will also push up the spire's gilded point. He who elevates the peasant will also in time elevate the prince. Jesus did not begin with Caesar, but with shepherds, and then in three hundred years a Christian Caesar ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... a new scene which in these days is much to be desired. The manner in which Lacroix had arranged to show both the exterior and interior of the church was a clever hit, every one agreed. Outside, with the clear blue sky for background, the spire of the church was clearly defined, and on a niche just above the main doorway stood an exquisitely carved statue of the patron St. Anne, holding by the hand her little daughter, the Blessed Virgin. And beyond the church and ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... of my spine, by concentrating them in admiration upon the scene. There was the Sphinx welcoming us with an immense smile of benevolence, as suitable to the sunshine as had been her mysterious solemnity to the moonlight. There, far away to the left, the spire-crowned Citadel floated in translucent azure. Its domes and minarets, and the long serrated line of the Mokattam Hills were carved against the sky in the yellow-rose of pink topaz. Shafts of light gave to jagged ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... or on different plants, the pollen being carried by insects or the wind. We may see a pretty illustration of this in the little wild flower known as the devil's-bit (Chamaelirium luteum,), whose long, white, tapering spire of feathery bloom may often be seen rising above the sedges in the swamp. Two years ago I chanced upon a little colony of four or five plants at the edge of a bog. The flowers, all of them, were mere petals and stamens (B, Fig. 8). I looked in ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... in that wonderful district, turning the streets into immense gorges, had, to a certain extent, protected one another against the effects of the waves, and the skeletons of many were yet standing. In the midst of them the dark spire of old Trinity still pointed stoutly upward, as if continuing its hopeless struggle against the spirit of worldly grandeur whose aspiring creations, though in ruins, yet dwarfed this symbol of immortality. At the intersection ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... said Gerald, as Anna began collecting vases from the tables in a drawing-room not professionally artistic, but entirely domestic, and full of grace and charm of taste, looking over a suburban garden fresh with budding spring to a church spire. ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a mile off—a house that nobody would take. And the natural inference was, that it had the reputation of being a ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... trading city in Belgium, on the Scheldt, 50 m. from the sea, with a beautiful Gothic cathedral, the spire 402 ft. high; the burial-place of Rubens; has a large picture-gallery full of the works of the Dutch ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... glance, would have set our author's theory on firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this beside the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and there, and low down in the depths of the descent, which was not so precipitous there as under the castle, the high houses and green braes were reflected in the quiet waters of the North Loch. From thence the fields and scattered farmhouses, the Calton Hill in unadorned greenness, a church spire and a cluster of village roofs here and there, led the eye to the shining of the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... 1830, the two fishermen engaged a caleche, and a boy named Louis Panet drove them up the Murray River. The present village church was already standing, "a respectable church," says Dr. Henry, "with its long roof and glittering spire and a tall elm or two"; the elms, alas, have disappeared and now there are only willows. A wooden bridge crossed the Murray and its large abutments loaded with great boulders told of formidable spring floods sweeping ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... long last farewell of the bells. Every eye is fastened on the chief bowman's steel-shod pole, held high—there is silence but for the bells—the bowman's pole is lowered—as with one stroke out sweep the paddles in a poetry of motion. The chimes die away over the water, the chapel spire gleams—it, too, is gone. Some one strikes up a plaintive ditty,—the voyageur's song of the lost lady and the faded roses, or the dying farewell of Cadieux, the hunter, to his comrades,—and the adventurers are launched ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Bishop's garden, who held themselves up proudly on the borders of the terraces, going slowly, as if walking merely to show themselves off. Sometimes, half lost in the blue sky, looking scarcely larger than a fly, a crow alighted on the point of a spire to smooth its wings. The old stones themselves were animated by the quiet working of the roots of a whole flora of plants, the lichens and the grasses, which pushed themselves through the openings in the walls. On very stormy days the entire apse seemed to awake and to ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... rocking the glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in the yard From the shining leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement, where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then, a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative scent on the air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... had left Augsburg a good many miles behind. A few miles more in the early morning brought him to a little village. From some distance he saw the spire of its church. He hastened his steps, lest Mass should be over before he ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little spire ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... perseverance, against apparently insurmountable difficulties, is given in an anecdote, not generally known out of Russia, connected with a church spire of St. Petersburg, which place is remarkable for its spires. The loftiest is the church of St. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... itself out before them, the undulating slope and shimmering loch, the wide moors and softly rounded hills, the dark green masses of ragged firs, and the great white Bens in the far distance, and below them, in the midst the human touch, in a nestling village with its Heaven-pointing spire. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... meadow was creeping, Bright on the dewy buds glistened the sun, When from his couch while his children were sleeping, Rose the bold rebel, and shouldered his gun. Waving her golden veil Over the silent dale, Blithe looked the morning on cottage and spire; Hushed was his parting sigh, While from his noble eye, Flashed the last sparkle ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... trees, Where first our marriage-vows were given, With merry peals shall swell the breeze And point with taper spire to Heaven. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... And Georgian hills erect their shady head; Whose flowery shrubs regale the passing air With all the untasted fragrance of the year. Beneath tall trees, dispersed in loose array, The rice-grown lawns their humble garb display; The infant maize, unconscious of its worth, Points the green spire and bends the foliage forth; In various forms unbidden harvests rise, And blooming life ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Tower of the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it the tower is, structurally, one of the wonders of the world. Exactly halfway between sidewalk and point of spire is the great clock with the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... gloomy. He did not know that she was seated behind it in a deep chair, wrapped in white things, and listening for him against the beatings of her heart. The large moon seemed to be spiked on the sharp spire of the church that is near her house, and the black shadows cut the white light as clean as with a knife. Nino had tuned his guitar in the other street, and stood ready, waiting for the clocks to strike. Presently they ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... 1629. These of Savigni and Tiron had formerly several houses in England. The Congregation of Bursfield in Germany, was established by a Reformation in 1461: that of Molck, vulgarly Mock, in Austria, in the diocese of Passaw, in 1418: that of Hirsauge, in the diocese of Spire, was instituted by St. William, abbot of S. Aurel, in 1080. The history of this abbey was written by Trithemius. After the change of religion it was secularized, and, by the treaty of Westphalia, ceded to the duke of Wirtemberg. The independent great ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... go! Stopping for a few minutes at Willesden Junction, our Irish horse pulls harder, and bolts with us for Rugby and some intermediate stations. It is just half-past seven a.m., a beautiful day. There is Harrow on the left, we can see the well-known spire, and we recall the days when we came up for the cricket-match against Eton, and how we all went back in ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... buttes that bordered the opposite shore of the river—solemn sentinels guarding the beauty and purity of this virgin land. Near her were sloping hills, dotted with thorny cactus and other prickly plants, and now rose a bald rock spire with its suggestion of grim lonesomeness. In the southern and eastern distances were the plains, silent, vast, unending. It seemed she had come to dwell in a land deserted by some cyclopean race. Its magnificent, unchanging beauty had ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... donkey by the halter and waited to see what would happen. He peered up and down and around and about, but there was nothing to be seen except the shining river, the yellow sand, a clump of bushes beside the road, and the spire of the monastery peeping over the top of the hill beyond. He was about to start the donkey once more on his climb towards home, when that sound came again; and this time he noticed that it was a sad sound, a sort of whining growl ending in a sob. It sounded nearer than before, and ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... remember the spot where we were standing. On one side lay the blue sea extending to the horizon, below us was the town with its white-walled, straw-thatched buildings, the church with its spire to the left, and before us were the green slopes of the hills sprinkled here and there with clumps of trees, while on the more level spots were to be seen corn-fields and orchards smiling in the rays of the setting sun. Beyond the town ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... towns Crawling out of their green shirts... Tubercular towns Coughing a little in the dawn... And the church... There is always a church With its natty spire And the vestibule— That's where they whisper: Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... How many codes for a wireless whisper— And corn flatter than it should be And those chits of leaves Gadding with every wind? Small towns From Connecticut to ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... a while he embarked again in the very same nut-shell of a boat that he had left Egypt in, passed right under the bows of the English vessels, and set foot once more in France. France acknowledged him; the sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; and all the people cried, "Long live ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... day when the ground upon which this building stands was vacant ground. Then men came with picks and shovels, wagons and plows, and set to work. They laid the foundations, stone upon stone. Then the walls rose, stone upon stone. Then the spire, stone upon stone, until the very peak was reached, for our church is stone from the foundation to the top of the spire. How were these thousands of stones put ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... down the descent, not far distant from the sea. A little brook, called in the language of the country a frwd, washes its yard-wall on the south. It is a small edifice with no spire, but to the south-west there is a little stone erection rising from the roof, in which hangs a bell—there is a small porch looking to the south. With respect to its interior I can say nothing, the door being locked. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... its twelve marble figures of the apostles, each weighing two tons, was badly injured by the fall of its Gothic spire, which crashed through the roof and demolished much of the interior; the great entrance archway was split in twain and wrecked; so, too, were the library, the gymnasium and the power house. A number of other buildings in the outer quadrangle and some ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... at intervals until the evening of the second day after their unsuccessful attempt to draw out Curtis Darwood. They were now passing through Frederick Sound, bordered by spire-shaped glaciers that towered in the sky, pale and chaste, more than two thousand feet above the sound. Darkness fell, the sky being overcast, and the air chill, giving the passengers the shivers and sending them to their cabins below. Tad Butler and Ned Rector had clambered ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... transept-crossing they stood amazed; for here the flutings ran up five hundred feet inside the stupendous central spire, among a marvelous filigree of windows which diminished toward the top—a lacework as of frost-patterns etched into the solid substance ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... man, or of his works, was there. The setting sun that cast such a gorgeous flood of light upon this exquisite panorama, bringing out some of these lofty islands in strong relief, and casting others into intense shade, shed no cheery beam upon church spire or cottage pane. We beheld the landscape, savage and grand ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... tradition! that is our salvation in the present going to pieces. I have always felt this instinctively. It came to me clearly only a few years ago. It is a bad thing to become wholly loosened from the soil, to forget the village church spire. Curiously enough poetry attaches only to objects that have come down to us, that have had long use. What is called progress, a vague and very doubtful term, rouses the lower parts of our intelligence. The higher parts vibrate ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the coast now closer and well-defined, La Touche sighted something ahead. It was a rock, high and pointed like a black spire protruding from the sea and standing there like an ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post. Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact that I was approaching ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... those derivatives, it is changed by the man himself in various ways, and sometimes into the opposite, which is called the conjugial or connubial principle of what is evil and false. When this is the case, the mind is closed from beneath, and is sometimes twisted as a spire into the contrary; but with some that principle is not closed, but remains half-open above, and with some open. The latter and the former conjugial principle is the source of those inclinations which children inherit from their parents, a son ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... and clean. How short and fat and dark and debauched he makes one feel! By nothing he says or means, of course, but merely by his old unconscious purity and simplicity—that slender straightness which makes him remind you of the spire of an English abbey. He greeted me with smiles, and stares, and alarming blushes. He assures me that he never would have known me, and that five years have altered me—sehr! I asked him if it were for the better? He looked at me ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... heaven, dark-blue, above it bowed; The sun shone o'er it, large and glowing; Beneath, a ministers structure proud Stood in the gold light, golden showing. It seemed on those great clouds, sun-clear, Aloft to hover, as on pinions; Its spire-point seemed to disappear, Melting away in ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... organist was not difficult, when one had come within sight of the lofty spire of the church, for it was under its shadow she lived; but if he had been accustomed to carry messages to her door for years, he could not now have presented himself with fuller confidence as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Their style is familiar to us, indeed, in a building of which it is difficult to believe the early date,—the leaning tower of Pisa. The lower stories of it are of the twelfth century, and the open arcades of the cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca, as well as the lighter construction of the spire of St. Niccol, at Pisa, (though this was built in continuation of the older style by Niccola himself,) all represent to you, though in enriched condition, the general manner of buidling in palaces ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... out together, all in the plainest leathern suits. The deed was done in the perfect stillness of the sleeping City, and without mishap or mischance. Stephen's strong hand held the ladder securely and aided to fix it to the ramps, and just as the early dawn was touching the summit of Saint Paul's spire with a promise of light, Giles stepped into the boat, and reverently placed his burden within the opening of a velvet cushion that had been ripped up and deprived of part of the stuffing, so as to conceal ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... outer influences which seemed to act upon that inward strife. The sky helped her with glimpses of holy blue and faint hints of the coming spring. Even the spire of a church helped her, although it could only point a very little way up into the far heaven. She stood quite still, wrestling silently with that fierce temptation to rejoice ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... on the streets was shooting at anybody else. It was late July, the great heats were gone for the time at least, and they were brisk and elated. They paused a little while in Capitol Square, and looked at the Bell Tower, rising like a spire, from the crest of which alarms were rung, then at the fine structure of St. Paul's Church. They intended to go into the State House now used as the Confederate Capitol, but that must wait until they ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... just born at the time Henry VIII. was cutting off pretty ladies' heads when he had tired of their hearts. Several tombs are so lovely, you almost want to be dead, and have one as like as possible; but, though part of the cathedral is satisfyingly old (eleventh century), its new spire reminds one of a badly chosen hat, and the whole building somehow looks cold and dull, like a person with a magnificent profile who never says ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... we rise slowly in the moonlight from St. Ambrose's quadrangle, and, when we are clear of the clock-tower, steer away southwards, over Oxford city and all its sleeping wisdom and folly, over street and past spire, over Christ Church and the canons' houses, and the fountain in Tom quad; over St. Aldate's and the river, along which the moonbeams lie in a pathway of twinkling silver, over the railway sheds—no, there ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... said, Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta. There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting before I returned to the station, and which, with its fine romanesque side-portal and its pointed and crocketed gothic spire, is as curious as it need be in view of its tradition. It stands in a quiet corner where the grass grows between the small cobble-stones, and you pass beneath a deep archway to reach it. The tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed with her own hands and attached to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... with a sense of joy, comfort, and protection; but she did not long keep Mr. Dutton to herself, for every third person they met gladly greeted him, and they were long in getting to St. Ambrose's Road, now dominated by a tall and beautiful spire, according to the original design. They turned and looked in at the pillared aisles, stained glass, and ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and traceries, and also at about half-height with a crown of thorns. The different sides of the Chapelle are in the same style—with buttresses between the windows, gables surmounting these, and a fine open parapet crowning all. The roof is sloping, and the height is over a hundred feet. The spire measures, from the vaulting, seventy feet. We entered by a stair-case the upper chapel, and an exquisite view presented itself. A single apartment, a half-circular chair, with fine, large windows, detached columns with bases and capitals, and fine groining—these all strike the eye of the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... long still curve towards the face of the mountain; and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the mist, and one smooth shoulder of ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... hillsides spread out in some places so as to afford sufficient breadths for cultivation; occasional hamlets appear amidst the fields and pine-woods; and far up, between you and the sky, an occasional church spire peeps up, indicating still loftier settlements, though how the people contrive to climb up to those heights is a wonder to the spectator who views ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... few rods from each other, stand before us. The central one has the most imposing aspect. It is a large Grecian building; having a portico, supported by four massive columns, from which rises a lofty bell-tower, ending in a spire. The combination of the belfry or spire with the Grecian style is a violation of propriety; but I like it. This is the "first" Congregational Church—that in which Dr. Bacon ministers. That church—not the building—is ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... beast, who was picking his way delicately through the filth and tumbled stones that lay everywhere, for the melodious roar seemed to be bidding him haste and be welcome. Mr. Morris was close beside him, and remarked on this and that as they went, the spire of St. Ann's away to the right, with St. Pancras's Bridge, a swinging sign over an inn with Queen Katharine's face erased, but plainly visible under Ann Boleyn's, the tall mound beyond the Priory crowned by a Calvary, and the roof of the famous dove-cote of the Priory, a great cruciform ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... right, near the intersection of Boylston and Tremont Streets, lies the half-forgotten, almost obliterated Central Burying Ground, the final resting-place of Gilbert Stuart, the famous American painter. At the left points the spire of Park Street Church, notable not for its age, for it is only a little over a century old, but for its charming beauty, and by the fact that William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first address here, and here "America" was sung in public for the first time. It was the windiness of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... stars, and I hear the other sentinels marching slowly back and forth, while the footsteps of the picket grew faint and fainter in the distance. I marched up and down the hedge with my gun on my arm. There was nothing to be seen but the village with its thatched roofs and the slated church spire a little farther on; and a mounted sentinel stationed in the road with his blunderbuss resting on his thigh looking out into the night. I walked up and down thinking and listening. Everything slept. The white line along the horizon grew broader. Another half ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... I enjoy it excessively. Besides, the shower is just over.—What church is that, Monsieur, with the very disproportionate steeple?" inquired Miselle, pointing to a square gray box, surmounted by a ludicrously short and obtuse spire, expressive of a certain dogged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and tools, and went away, tugging her basket of weeds. Elliott, left behind, surveyed the borders critically. To cut without letting it appear that she had cut was evidently what Aunt Jessica wanted. She reached in and snipped off a spire of larkspur from the very back of the border, then stood back to see what had happened. No, if one hadn't known the stalk had been there, one wouldn't now know it was gone. The thing could be done, then. Cautiously she selected ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... be a girl, he tells her to build only a spire, for "modesty beseemeth a woman." Well for Sir Asker that he did not live in our day of clamoring suffragists. He would have "views" without doubt. But no such things troubled him while he battled in foreign lands all summer. It ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... country, it was a step from which the French army derived a very manifest and important advantage; for it secured to them the course of the Maine and the Upper Rhine; by which they received, without difficulty or danger, every species of supply from Mentz, Spire, Worms, and even the country of Alsace, while it maintained their communication with the chain formed by the Austrian forces and the army of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... too absorbed in the scene to utter a word; the minarets of the mosques, the vast spire of Shway Dagon, the famous pagoda, its crest of gold glittering in the last rays of the sun; the crowd of masts, the native boats, the swift little sampans darting hither and thither, the quaint up-river craft, the Chinese junks—all was so new and strange and wonderful that he ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... Gondis, talking to them. They alone of this dismal assembly were smiling. Albert Gondi, now Duc de Retz, marshal of France, and gentleman of the bed-chamber, had been deputed to marry the queen by proxy at Spire. In the first line of courtiers nearest to the king stood the Marechal de Tavannes, who was present on court business; Neufville de Villeroy, one of the ablest bankers of the period, who laid the foundation of the great house of that name; Birago and Chiverni, gentlemen of the queen-mother, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the size of the jay. His plumage is white as snow. On his forehead rises a spiral tube nearly three inches long. It is jet black, dotted all over with small white feathers. It has a communication with the palate, and when filled with air looks like a spire; when empty it becomes pendulous. His note is loud and clear, like the sound of a bell, and may be heard at the distance of three miles. In the midst of these extensive wilds, generally on the dried top of an aged mora, almost out of gun-reach, you will see the campanero. No ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... those interested in the question to the Greek Melic poets, and to the many excellent French studies on the subject by such distinguished and well-equipped authors as Remy de Gourmont, Gustave Kahn, Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Henri Gheon, Robert de Souza, Andre Spire, etc. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... a fine view of the harbor, the wharves crowded with shipping, and the neighboring shores of Long Island and New Jersey. Towards the north they looked down for many miles upon continuous lines of streets, and thousands of roofs, with here and there a church-spire rising above its neighbors. Dick had never before been up there, and he, as well as Frank, was interested in the ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... But whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... to the way-weary men limping down the savannah. The sight of the sea was not more cheering to the Greeks than the sight of the great gilt weathercock, shifting on the spire, to these haggard ruffians with the blood not yet dry upon their beards. They flung their hats into the air, and danced and shouted. All their trumpets shouted a levity, their drums beat, and their colours were displayed. They camped there, with songs and laughter, ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... moment will come when the travellers descend, and then begins the danger; then they differ about throwing out the ballast, the balloon is rent in the quarrel, it sinks with frightful rapidity, and they run the hazard, like the poor Marquis D'Arlande, of being spitted upon the spire of the Invalides, or of being entangled among woods and briers—at last, alighting upon the earth, our adventurers, fatigued and bruised and disappointed, come out of their shattered triumphal car, exposed to the derision of the ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... and one gentleman, at least, of taste—Mr. Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its building; but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoiled as yet by factory smoke, its spire delicately pointing to untainted skies, its rose window glowing above the porch, citizens on Tower Street often stopped to gaze at it diagonally across the vacant lot set in order by Mr. Thurston Gore, with the intent that the view ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the village the church stood high, its spire clearly defined against the blue of the sky. The door of the cafe across the road opened, and the proprietress, a merry-faced, elderly woman, came across to the farmhouse. She purchased some newly laid eggs for breakfast, and entered into conversation with ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... of trees and houses from the slope of our garden, W. V. saw the roof and spire of the church of the Oak-men showing well above the green huddle of ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... were not bothering about gold and silver," thought Bart, as after feasting his eyes upon the fish he turned to gaze upon the beauties of the drooping trees, and spire-shaped pines that grew as regular in shape as if they had been cast in the same mould; while, above all, the gloriously coloured walls of the canyon excited his wonder, and made him long to scale them, climbing into the many apparently inaccessible ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... beaten brick, unfinished like so many of the Belgian towers, but rough, massive, and grand, like some rude giant. On the north, behind the Palais de Justice and the belfry, stands St. Walburga, with the delicate tracery of her flying buttresses and her spire fine as a needle. There is something fitting in the rugged simplicity which commemorates the grand old Bishop, and in the exquisite fragility of the shrine of the virgin saint. The double flying buttresses of St. ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... taken with his knowledge o' horseflesh, helped him down the road as never a man was helped before or since. 'Twas striking nine at night when he started out of London with the reprieve in his pocket, and by half-past five in the morning he spied Salisbury spire lifting out of the morning light. There was some hitch here—the first he met—in getting a relay; but by six he was off again, and passed through Exeter early in the afternoon. Down came a heavy rain as the evening drew in, ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to an ordinary vessel dependent on its sails. The shock seemed to have shaken the berg itself, for at that moment a crashing sound was heard overhead. The terror-stricken crew looked up, and for one moment a pinnacle like a church spire was seen to flash through the air right above them. It fell with an indescribable roar close alongside, deluging the decks with water. There was a momentary sigh of relief, which, however, was chased away by a succession of falling masses, varying from a pound to a ton in weight, which ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... down among them?—among those sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth with the deep colour of heaven upon it, is starting up in strength of goodly spire; and whose purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of promise;—and still they turn to you, and for you, "The Larkspur listens—I hear, I hear! And the Lily ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... hand, and looked earnestly down the long snow-clad road in the direction of the little village of St. Pascal. Behind her stood Baptiste, also shading his weak eyes and looking. Not a human being was in sight. The zinc-covered spire of the little village church, nearly half a mile away, glittered and shone in the fairy light like burnished silver. The quaint whitewashed cottages that dotted the road to the village looked far different from what they did in the daytime; somehow the charitable ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... before any of them, however—up and out into the pearl-dusk of the morning before ever the alarm-clock shrilled its first note, or the sun's sheen slid lower than the spurs of the weather-cock on the spire of Lyntonhurst Old Church—and twice he had walked past the big gates and looked up the still avenue to the windows of the huge house whose roof covered her before Lyntonhurst Old Church spoke up through the dawn-hush and told the parish it was ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Hereford, and owning that in that precinct, tone and colour, design and form, solemn tower and storied window, are all in unison, and all perfect! Who could lie basking in the cloisters of Salisbury, and gaze on Jewel's library and that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... hedge and ha-ha prevented trespass; but those invited there found in this quiet sun-trap many headstones, bearing names and dates and epitaphs. Close by, a path, along which members of the family went often to and fro, led to yet another quiet corner, where a well-known spire showed above the trees. From this last there sounded at intervals the music of bells, chiming, or ringing solemnly, and beneath its shadow slept other folk, who had once walked the world with these same dogs of many generations, earning epitaphs no better, if as good, as they. To lie in ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... remains of General Saint-Hilaire and the Duke de Montebello, the remains of the marshal being placed near the tomb of Turenne. The mornings were spent in the celebration of several masses, at a double altar which was raised between the nave and the dome; and for four days there floated from the spire of the dome a long black banner or flag ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... hot touch, so marvellous and shining, A hundred steeples on the sky out-lining, Like network threads of fire; Above them all, with halo far outspreading, I saw a golden cross in glory heading A consecrated spire: ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... toward Toroczko, which lay smiling in the valley, its fruit-trees in full bloom, its fields looking like so many squares of green carpet, and its church-spire rising conspicuous above the foliage, one could hear, like the throbbing of a giant's heart, the heavy beating of steam hammers. There the scythe and the ploughshare were being fashioned, and all the implements wherewith the hand ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church in Langham Place, London, appeared in the distance; and the whole formed a 'valentine,' of which, as a written inscription in the window testified, there was a large assortment within, which the shopkeeper pledged himself to dispose of, to his countrymen ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... expression "to add the finishing touches." The enumeration is completed; the poem, the picture, the statue is finished. To terminate may be either to bring to an arbitrary or to an appropriate end; as, he terminated his remarks abruptly; the spire terminates in a cross. A thing stops that comes to rest from motion; or the motion stops or ceases when the object comes to rest; stop frequently signifies to bring or come to a sudden and decided ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... had labored with such devotion, and where so many of the despised race had laid the foundation of a knowledge that they vainly hoped might lift them up into the perfect light of freedom, was a solid spire of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to say that this country rests upon a great, solid foundation of old, paid-up subscribers. They are the invisible, rock-ribbed resting-place for the dazzling superstructure and the slim and peaked spire. Whether we procure a new press or a new dress, a new contributor or a new printers' towel, we must bank on the old subscriber; for the new one is fickle, and when some other paper gives him a larger or a redder covered book, he may desert our standard. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... answered at once and the chatter drifted into a side eddy of fashions. But Anne, with her elbows on the window sill, her soft cheek laid against her clasped hands, and her eyes filled with visions, looked out unheedingly across city roof and spire to that glorious dome of sunset sky and wove her dreams of a possible future from the golden tissue of youth's own optimism. All the Beyond was hers with its possibilities lurking rosily in the oncoming years—each year a rose of promise to be woven ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... we're coming to that. There's some bad animal that I've heard of that lives in France, and when folks attack it it defends itself. I've just been defending myself. I think I've shown you that you're no brand-new extra-gilt angel on the top of a spire. ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... awe and exultation. And as they looked the sunlight triumphed, scattering the fog into queer floating shapes, luminous and fraught with weird suggestions of castle, dome, of turret, minaret and towering spire. One might have thought a splendid city lay before them in the barren cove of sand-dunes, a city impalpable, yet triumphant, with its hint of destiny; translucent silver and gold, shifting and amazing—gone in a flash as the sun's full radiance ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... there, beside the village-spire, My mother's honour'd ashes sleep, Who bade my noble hopes aspire, Who also taught me first to weep, When, with a kiss so cold and mild, She whisper'd, 'I must ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... at a wash-tub. The destroyers of the tower of Rheims are quite capable of destroying the Tower of Giotto. But they are equally capable of the greater crime of completing it. And if they put on a spire, what a spire it would be! What an extinguisher for that clear and almost transparent Christian candle! Have you read some of the German explanations of Hamlet? Did I tell you that Leonardo's hair must have been German hair, ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... Herefordshire; and a very curious one entirely of timber, with the frame for the bells springing from the ground, at Pembridge, Herefordshire. At Salisbury a fine early English detached campanile, 200 feet in height, surmounted by a timber turret and spire, stood near the north-west corner of the cathedral, but ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... foreign-looking citizens—the full-fledged Rusk of the unmistakable type is hard to find nowadays,—and troops of Indians give a semblance of life to this quarter. At the head of the street stands the Russian Orthodox Church; and this edifice, with its quaint tower and spire, is really the lion of the place. St. Michael's was dedicated in 1844 by the Venerable Ivan Venianimoff, the metropolitan of Moscow, for years priest and ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and sought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... would have needed much money, and guides are poor people, monsieur—not like your professional cricketers," he said, with a laugh. And then he turned toward the massive wall of mountains. Here and there a slim rock spire, the Dru or the Charmoz, pointed a finger to the stars, here and there an ice-field glimmered like a white mist held in a fold of the hills. But to Michel Revailloud, the whole vast range was spread out as on a raised map, buttress and ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... window, apparently across the street. But between the two houses on the other side of the thoroughfare was a considerable open space, and through this, far away, on the mount, could be seen the chateau. The sunlight shone bright on turret and spire; its walls were white and glistening; its outlines, graceful and airy ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... his friend at this point, for he saw by the clock on Trinity spire that it was time to go back to join Paul Hoffman, as he had agreed. I may here add that Phil's wrongs were avenged that same evening, his friend, Dick, administered to Tim the promised "lickin'" with such good effect that ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... pond-lily, whose very breath is a blessing to all the region round about.... Among the productions of the river's margin, I must not forget the pickerel-weed, which grows just on the edge of the water, and shoots up a long stalk crowned with a blue spire, from among large green leaves. Both the flower and the leaves look well in a vase with pond-lilies, and relieve the unvaried whiteness of the latter; and, being all alike children of the waters, they are perfectly in keeping with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... we have often wished ourselves "far from the sight of city, spire, or sound of minster clock." One feels most for the sheep and lambs, when the softened fancy recurs to the streams and hedgerows, and pleasant pastures, from whence the woolly exiles have been ejected; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... digging of potatoes,—how I longed to turn up the historic soil, into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so many generations, with my own spade,—then upon the quaint, old, thatched houses, or the cluster of tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a meadow (and it is all meadow), or at the remains of tower or wall overrun ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the air, Charging the very texture of the gray With something luminous and rare? The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire, And, as one lights a candle, it is day. The extinguisher that fain would strut for spire On the formal little church is not yet green Across the water: but the house-tops nigher, The corner-lines, the chimneys—look how clean, How new, how naked! See the batch of boats, Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam! And those ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... foot of a rough, scraggly yellow birch, on a bank of club-moss, so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining leaves—with here and there in the bordering a spire of false wintergreen strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of a May orchard—that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I recline to note what transpires. The sun is just past the meridian, and the afternoon chorus is not yet in full tune. Most birds sing with the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... to make one think "long, long thoughts"; and if the traveller looks backward when he has crossed this common, he will see Sedgehill Church, crowning and commanding the vast expanse, and pointing heavenward with its slender spire to remind him, and all other wayfaring men, that the beauty and glory of this present world is only an earnest and a foretaste of something ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... cloud o'er her brain. You gaze through a sort of traditional mist, And behold a mirage of God's laws which exist But in fancy. God made but one law—it is love. A law for the earth, and the kingdoms above, A law for the woman, a law for the man, The base and the spire of His intricate plan Of existence. All evils the world ever saw Had birth in man's breaking away from this law. God cancels a marriage when love flies away. "Till death do us part" should be altered to say, "Till disgust or indifference ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the flood reclining, Ruined arch and wall and broken spire, Down beneath the watery mirror shining, Gleam and flash ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the territorial, as distinct ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... neighbouring hills, and followed its windings through the leafless forest, until it united its waters to those of the Calder, and swept on in swifter and clearer current, to wash the base of Whalley Abbey. But the watcher's survey did not stop here. Noting the sharp spire of Burnley Church, relieved against the rounded masses of timber constituting Townley Park; as well as the entrance of the gloomy mountain gorge, known as the Grange of Cliviger; his far-reaching gaze ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the quiet pastoral landscape was where a little string of farm laborers were trudging homeward across the park, with their baskets over their shoulders. Beyond, the land sloped into a pleasant tree-encompassed hollow, and I could see the red-tiled roofs of the cottages, and the worn, grey spire of the village church. There was scarcely a breath of wind. Everything around me seemed to stand for peace. Many a night before I had stood here, smoking my pipe and drinking it all in—absolutely content with myself, my surroundings, and my life. And to-night I felt, with a ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of peace. All was joy in the provinces, but at Antwerp, the metropolis of the land, the enthusiasm was unbounded. Nine days were devoted to festivities. Bells rang their merriest peals, artillery thundered, beacons blazed, the splendid cathedral spire flamed nightly with three hundred burning cresaets, the city was strewn with flowers and decorated with triumphal arches, the Guilds of Rhetoric amazed the world with their gorgeous processions, glittering dresses and bombastic versification, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... use: And the great cord, renowned of old, Which Varun ever loves to hold. Take these two thunderbolts, which I Have got for thee, the Moist and Dry. Here Siva's dart to thee I yield, And that which Vishnu wont to wield. I give to thee the arm of Fire, Desired by all and named the Spire. To thee I grant the Wind-God's dart, Named Crusher, O thou pure of heart, This arm, the Horse's Head, accept, And this, the Curlew's Bill yclept, And these two spears, the best e'er flew, Named the Invincible and True. And arms of fiends I make thine own, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... traveller! The castle was, to my eye, of all castles which I had seen, the most elevated in its situation, and the most difficult of access. The clouds of heaven seemed to be resting upon its battlements. But what do I see yonder? "Is it the top of the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral?" "It is, Sir," replied the postilion. I pulled off my travelling cap, by way of doing homage; and as I looked at my watch, to know the precise time, found it was just ten o'clock. It was ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... so impressed with the many points of resemblance between lightning and electricity, that he was convinced of their identity, and determined to ascertain by direct experiment the truth of his bold conjecture. A spire which was erecting at Philadelphia he conceived might assist him in this inquiry; but, while waiting for its completion, the sight of a boy's kite, which had been raised for amusement, immediately suggested to him a more ready method ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and apron, waiting to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would be the bright fire, the cheerful supper table, the soft bed turned ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... showed—the warehouses and shops of the merchants along the beach, the spire of a church, a line of wharf, a hundred tiny homes all but hidden in the foliage of the ferns. These gradually came into view as the ship, after skirting along the reef, steered through a break in the foam, a pass in the treacherous ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... observed it the less did it appear to resemble either Eden or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At times I felt dull. I would lean over the parapet of the bridge at the other end of the High Street, and watch the tower and decorated spire of the old parish church rise from the gold and russet bosom of the church-yard elms, and wish I were back on the Pont Neuf with the tumultuous life of Paris around me. There was a lack of breeziness in the social ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... E. by N. and W. by S., and is ten leagues long in that direction, and no where above three or four leagues broad. The coast is rocky, much indented, and seemed to form several bays or inlets. It shews a surface of craggy hills which spire up to a vast height, especially near the west end. Except the craggy summits of the hills, the greatest part was covered with trees and shrubs, or some sort of herbage, and there was little or no snow on it. The currents between ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... dressed, by an open window of his room in Dr. Sevier's house, leaning on the arm of his soft chair and looking out at the passers on the street, among whom he had begun to notice some singular evidences of excitement, there came from a slender Gothic church-spire that was highest of all in the city, just beyond a few roofs in front of him, the clear, sudden, brazen peal of its one ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... him we should be most happy to come. He then asked me to take a walk. I agreed with pleasure, and we set out, intending to go to Llansilio at the western end of the valley and look at the church. The church was an ancient building. It had no spire, but had the little erection on its roof, so usual to Welsh churches, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... I said as I gazed up at the grand green spire of a Douglas pine, tapering gradually up, as if it intended to pierce the bright ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... is very refreshing; and it is Sunday, and we have got away from the wicked for an hour or two; but in England there would be a little white church out yonder, and a spire like an angel's forefinger pointing from the grass to heaven, and the lads in their clean smock-frocks like snow, and the wenches in their white stockings and new shawls, and the old women in their scarlet cloaks and black bonnets, all going one road, and a tinkle-tinkle from the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... dust-covered, broken, in the corner. Below the window lay the old churchyard: he saw it green in the distance, the sun glancing through the yew-trees; he saw the tomb where father and mother lay united, and the spire pointing up to heaven, the symbol of the hopes of those who consigned the ashes to the dust; in his ear rang the bells, pealing, as on a Sabbath day. Far fled all the visions of anxiety and awe that had haunted and convulsed; youth, boyhood, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... when the sea fog wrapped a shroud Round spar and spire and tarn and tree, Her soul went up on that lifted cloud From this sad old house ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... plantations of dark pines give it this sombre hue, but in reality the waters are clear as crystal. Beyond these groves, still looking south, you discover the woods about Wardour Castle, and amongst them the silvery gleam of another sheet of water. To the south-west is the giant spire of Salisbury, which since the fall of Fonthill Tower now reigns in solitary stateliness over these vast regions of down and desert. Stourton Tower presents itself to the north, whilst to the west, in the extreme distance, several ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... attempted to make a stand, but were shelled out by the Russians with their heavy guns. There were only three buildings in the city which were not reduced to ruins. These were two churches and the Town Hall, which, having a church-like spire, the Russians evidently took for a church of worship, also. In this connection, we may quote here a second proclamation which the Grand Duke Nicholas, as Commander in Chief of the Russian forces, distributed in the districts of Austria captured ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... persuaded to the contrary. The presents which they sent to our General, were feathers, and cauls of network. Their houses are digged round about with earth, and have from the uttermost brims of the circle, clifts of wood set upon them, joining close together at the top like a spire steeple, which by reason of that closeness are very warm. Their bed is the ground with rushes strowed on it; and lying about the house, [they] have the fire in the midst. The men go naked; the women take bulrushes, and kemb ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... being thrown across in order to disguise the alteration, and perhaps owes much of its charm to the contrast it makes with the severity of military lines. Even the great west window looks like an afterthought; one's instinct asks for a blank wall. Yet, from the ground up to the cross on the spire, one feels the Norman nature throughout, animating the whole, uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic. Nothing about ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... ruins of the Recollet Church of the Jesuits. To this day it is possibly the most symmetrical in appearance of any church of the Church of England in Canada. Exteriorly, it is 135 feet in length and 73 in breadth, while the height of the spire above the ground is 152 feet, the height from the floor to the centre arch, within, being 41 feet. The communion plate, together with the altar cloth, hangings of the desk and pulpit of crimson velvet and cloth of gold, and the books for divine service, was a private present from ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... amphitheatre-shaped town on parallel streets rise tiers of white stone houses, relieved by spire and tower. On neighboring highest hills are old castles, forts, and ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... climbed a hill, all came in for his approval—then we were at the lane that led to his new home, and the procession behind dropped away. The carriage ascended still higher, and a view opened across the Saugatuck Valley, with its nestling village and church-spire and farmhouses, and beyond them the distant hills. Then came the house—simple in design, but beautiful—an Italian villa, such as he had known in Florence, adapted here to American climate ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... they were entangled in the very centre of the folds of that monstrous anaconda. Their footing was a lap of level not more than thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation. Above them rose a precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was undoubtedly a mile in height. Had there been armies or cities over their heads, they could not have discovered it ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... knowing what to fear, wept for fashion, because they saw their mother weep, filled me with terror for them, though I did not for myself fear death; and all my thoughts were bent to contrive means for their safety. I tied my youngest son to the end of a small spire mast, such as seafaring men provide against storms; at the other end I bound the youngest of the twin slaves, and at the same time I directed my wife how to fasten the other children in like manner to another mast. She thus having the care of the eldest two children, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... note of Melford and its ways than I had done hitherto, and the more I observed it the less did it appear to resemble either Eden or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At times I felt dull. I would lean over the parapet of the bridge at the other end of the High Street, and watch the tower and decorated spire of the old parish church rise from the gold and russet bosom of the church-yard elms, and wish I were back on the Pont Neuf with the tumultuous life of Paris around me. There was a lack of breeziness in ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... let the diving Negro seek For gems hid in some forlorn creek, We all Pearls scorn, Save what the dewy morne Congeals upon each little spire of grasse, Which careless Shepherds beat down as they passe, And Gold ne're here appears Save what ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... blight. They look healthy, and as has already been said, they make a beautiful tree. And if you want an avenue of trees on a drive that don't spread too wide and run up like Lombardi poplar, they'll beat Lombardi poplar all to pieces. And if you crowd them a little, they will grow up like a spire and retain their branches, so you really have ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... church with a pointed spire stood on the highest point of the cliff, close to the town. Behind the cliff rose a hill of some height, upon which the better houses, with red-tiled roofs, were situated. A wide road led up ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... road. Occasionally, indeed, the fog would become less dense, and we could see the fine lawns of the seats of the nobility and gentry, which were scattered on our route, and which still retained their verdure. Now and then the spire and towers of some ancient village church rose out of the leafless trees, beautifully simple in their forms, and sometimes clothed to the very tops with the evergreen ivy. It was severely cold; my eyebrows, hair, cap, and the fur of my cloak were soon coated with frost, but I determined ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Delhem a dome spire sprung white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... proceeded by Utrecht, Nimegnen, Cleves, Duysberg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonne, Coblentz, Nassau, Hocheim, Frankfort, and made an excursion to Hanau, then to Mayence, and another excursion to Rudesheim, and Johansberg; then by Oppenheim, Worms, and Manheim, making an excursion to Heidelberg, then by Spire, Carlsruhe, Rastadt, and Kelh, to Sfrasburg, where I arrived April the 16th, and proceeded again on the 18th, by Phalsbourg, Fenestrange, Dieuze, Moyenvie, Nancy, Toul, Ligny, Barleduc, St. Diziers, Vitry, Chalons ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... blessed tears of relief that she shed when Miss Monro, herself weeping bitterly, told her to put her head out of the post-chaise window, for at the next turning of the road they would catch the last glimpse of Hamley church spire. ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... far up on the spire the black-haired man who had given him the fiddle. "Give it back to me," he now shouted, laughing, and stretching out his arms, and the spire went up and down with him, up and down. But the boy took the fiddle under one ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... prowess of a Quixote tilting against, yea, stouter foes than wind-mills, were I to have commenced with an attack upon external church architecture: this topic let us leave to the fraternity of builders; only asking by what rule of taste an obelisk-like spire, is so often stuck upon the roof of a Grecian temple, and by what rule of convenience gigantic columns so commonly and resolutely sentinel the narrowest of exits and entrances. Let us be more commonly contented, as well ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... attached to the King, she opened out her heart to me with natural candour; and whenever in the country she observed the turrets or the spire of a monastery, she sighed, and I saw her beautiful blue eyes ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... strongly contrasting the gay river scenery he had so lately quitted,—quite as English, but rather the England of a former race than that which spreads round our own generation like one vast suburb of garden-ground and villas. Here, nor village nor spire, nor porter's lodge came in sight. Rare even were the cornfields; wide spaces of unenclosed common opened, solitary and primitive, on the road, bordered by large woods, chiefly of beech, closing the horizon with ridges of undulating green. In ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ruthless and frightful method. We used to slaughter the entire population. To shoot a selected few is to court a maximum of contempt for a minimum of advantage. We used to lay waste the land. We did not content ourselves with knocking down a church spire and burning a library. We left not one stone upon another. We sowed salt where the cities had been. We tortured our prisoners before the ramparts. We did not "leave them their eyes to weep with"; we burned them out with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ever saw anything so beautiful," said Alice. "How fine that spire of rock is, shooting up from the feathered shrubs at the base! I will come here some day and ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... wings; while beyond rose a range of smooth downs, the intermediate space being sprinkled over with neat farmhouses and labourers' cottages; and rising above the trees appeared the grey, ivy-covered tower of the parish church, with the taper spire pointing upwards to the clear blue sky—not more clear or bright, though, than his Mary's eyes; so True Blue thought, whether ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... fact is absent, as being uninvolved. "There is nowhere more of it consecutively, perhaps, than appears upon this present page." There is, indeed, to put it otherwise, no more one all-enveloping fact than there is one all-enveloping spire in an endlessly growing spiral, and no more one all-generating fact than there is one central point in which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite" belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our author. "And to what? Time turns a weary ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Empire are in Quebec to-day. Quebec is French to the core, not in loyalty to republican France, but in loyalty to the religious ideals which the founders brought to the banks of the St. Lawrence three centuries ago. Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of Quebec. From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New Hampshire, you can follow the thread of every river in ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... and mountain-heads afar. There were fields of grain, and blue waving feathers from chimneys of cottage and farm-house. In the distance showed a village, one street climbing a hill, and atop a church with a spire piercing the clear east. The stream widened, flowing thin over a pebbly bed. The sun was not yet down. It painted a glory in the west and set lanes and streets of gold over the hills and made the little river like Pactolus. Strickland approached a farm-house, prosperous and venerable, mended and ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... "regular verse." We refer those interested in the question to the Greek Melic poets, and to the many excellent French studies on the subject by such distinguished and well-equipped authors as Remy de Gourmont, Gustave Kahn, Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Henri Gheon, Robert de Souza, Andre Spire, etc. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... Village," and another woman comes down to pray, the object of attraction to all eyes. But this is the QUEEN of Madagascar. On the white ridge which overhangs the ditch where RASALAMA died, stands a handsome church, with its lofty spire, which has been erected to her memory, and will bear her name upon its walls. The church is crowded with christian worshippers, and vast numbers are compelled to remain outside. The Queen, not a persecutor, but ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... outside too and pleasant ones. From the south window, straight down the street, the houses and trees and the brown spire of the Methodist church stretched away—roofs and gable ends and the enormous tufty heads of the elm trees that half hung over them. At the back of these houses, the eye went uninterruptedly over meadows and fields to the belt of woods which skirted at ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... in smoking delicately and keeping the white ash whole to the end; the German surrounds himself with a cloud, and, god-like, meditates within it; there is a sacrificial air about the Asiatic's narghileh, as the thin spire rises steadily and spreads above his head; but the Englishman's short briar-root pipe has a powerful individuality of its own. Its simplicity is Gothic, its solidity is of the Stone Age, he smokes it in the face of the ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... come freshening winds that hint of the heaving Firth not far away. The road pursued by the coach meanders among all that is best of rural and pastoral scenery, for coaly Annbank, defaced by the exhumed entrails of the earth, is happily on the rear. At a turn of the road, a majestic spire, that of Tarbolton Parish Church, suddenly stands before the view of the traveller, and suggests Eternity even when tolling the hours of Time. Soon the village is reached, and one is in a position to form an idea of eighteenth century Scotland. The main street is built with that ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... road that passed his farm and wound down into the shady depths. He could see it twisting in and out among the elms, and on through the village where the tall smoke-stack of the saw-mill, the church spire and the chimneys of the houses rose out of the green orchards. It crossed the blue line of the river where the old church stood, and then went winding up the opposite hill ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... feet up, so that people might think you were swimming. I ask you again, what pleasure is it to sit in a little room on a summer's evening, when the great dome of the sky is dropping over the other side of the town, lighting up the spire of the church, the shingle roofs of the baths, and the big windows of the synagogue. And on the other side of the town, on the common, the goats are bleating, and the lambs are frisking, the dust rising to the heavens, the frogs croaking. There is a tearing and a ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... to my eye, of all castles which I had seen, the most elevated in its situation, and the most difficult of access. The clouds of heaven seemed to be resting upon its battlements. But what do I see yonder? "Is it the top of the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral?" "It is, Sir," replied the postilion. I pulled off my travelling cap, by way of doing homage; and as I looked at my watch, to know the precise time, found it was just ten o'clock. It was worth ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... that shows no sign of human habitation, that knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at home—wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air with its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky and, in the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these fertile ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... one which he went to, in the basement of a church. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaning in the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called so because the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there told him so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and a Catholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubt there were other churches; but he had nothing ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... Dufferin Terrace, the observer sees spread beneath him the picturesque Cote de Beaupre, a graceful upland losing itself in the Laurentian foot-hills. A shining spire in the middle distance arrests the eye. It marks the village of Ancient Lorette, a nine miles' drive from Quebec, where a pitiful moiety of Canada's noblest Indian tribe ekes out an existence by the making of baskets and beaded moccasins, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... full of breezes and perfume, Brimful of promise of midsummer weather, When bees and birds and I are glad together, Breathes of the full-leaved season, when soft gloom Chequers thy streets, and thy close elms assume Round roof and spire the semblance of green billows; Yet now thy glory is the yellow willows, The yellow willows, full ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Mike's a child to him, a two years child— Chrisom child." "Who's Mike?" my brother growled A little roughly. Quoth the fisherman— "Mike, Sir? he's just a fisher lad, no more; But he can sing, when he takes on to sing, So loud there's not a sparrow in the spire But needs must hear. Sir, if I might make bold, I'd ask what song that was you sung. My mate, As we were shoving off the mackerel boats, Said he, 'I'll wager that's the sort o' song They kept their hearts ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... domes are very narrow, and those on the tambours or cylinders of the smaller cupolas are curved and slope obliquely at an angle of seventy degrees, which gives the spectator the impression that they are leaning, somewhat in the same manner as the well-known spire at Chesterfield. The ornamentation on the outside surpasses all powers of description. It comprises a large corded moulding, about halfway between the pediment and the cornice, passing right round the main building; and circular shields above this moulding, which, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture. In front, on a little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red architecture of Bursley—tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... beautiful timber. There is a prairie lawn, spread like a carpet in patterns composed of pretty wild flowers. Upon it stand hundreds of cottage-built tenements, covered with the creeping vine. In the centre, the presidio, or government-house; on one side the graceful spire of a church, on the other the massive walls of a convent. Above all, is a sky of the deepest cobalt blue, richly contrasting with the dark green of the tall pines, and the uncertain and indescribable tints on the ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... door, opened it, and standing on the steps shaded her eyes with her hand, and looked earnestly down the long snow-clad road in the direction of the little village of St. Pascal. Behind her stood Baptiste, also shading his weak eyes and looking. Not a human being was in sight. The zinc-covered spire of the little village church, nearly half a mile away, glittered and shone in the fairy light like burnished silver. The quaint whitewashed cottages that dotted the road to the village looked far different ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... Spike najlego. Spile ligna najlo. Spill (liquid) disversxi. Spill (corn, etc.) dissxuti. Spin sxpini. Spinage spinaco. Spinal spina. Spindle akso. Spine spino. Spinning-wheel radsxpinilo. Spinning-top turnludilo. Spinster sxpinistino (frauxlino). Spiral helikforma. Spire pregxeja turo, sonorilejo. Spirit (soul) spirito. Spirit (energy) energio. Spirit (ghost) fantomo. Spirit alkoholo. Spiritual spirita. Spiritualism spiritualismo. Spiritualist spiritualisto. Spirituous alkohola. Spit kracxi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lay buried. "'Only listen to that in Charleston streets!' exclaimed Garrison, on hearing the band of one of the black regiments playing the air of 'Old John Brown', and we both broke into tears," relates Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, who stood by the side of the pioneer that April morning under the spire of St. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... are digged around about with earth and have for the brim of that circle, clefts of wood set upon the ground and joined closely together at the top like the spire of a steeple, which by reason of this closeness are very warm. The men go naked, but the women make themselves loose garments knit about the middle, while over their shoulders they wear the skin ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... levers and rollers, and after working hard for a couple of days, the school was twisted round and removed to the far corner of the lot. Then the foundations were dug for the new church. It was decided that it should be a brick building, with a spire, to cost about 1500 dollars. Mr. Jacobs, my assistant, busied himself in the matter, and together we managed to raise the requisite funds; and early in the spring building ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... the angles deeply truncated so also form an unequal octagon. The main feature in this central pile is the great dome, which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. Beneath it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the princess and of her husband, the Emperor. Each corner of the mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at Mount Carmel, Illinois, in June of '77. That made progress at the rate of thirty-four miles an hour, yet its force was so mighty that it tore away the spire, vane, and heavy gilded ball of the Methodist church, and kept it in air over a ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... almighty man, The county God—in whose capacious hall, Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree Sprang from the midriff of a prostrate king— Whose blazing wyvern weathercock'd the spire, Stood from his walls and wing'd his entry-gates And swang besides on many a windy sign— Whose eyes from under a pyramidal head Saw from his windows nothing save his own— What lovelier of his own had he than her, His only child, his Edith, whom he ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... therefore not able further to see the progress of the work that he had inspired. His plans, however, were carefully followed by his successor, with the exception, as has already been said, of substituting a spire for a tower, owing to undue settlement at the tower end. This building is 250 feet long internally, by 65 feet in width, with nave and side aisles; or, with the north and south transepts, 95 feet, the transepts being used as porticoes. The simple columns, with plain mouldings only, carried ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... they spoke, when fair and soft, The roof began to mount aloft; Aloft rose ev'ry beam and rafter; The heavy wall went clambering after. The chimney widen'd, and grew higher, Became a steeple with a spire. The kettle to the top was hoist, And there stood fastened to a joist, But with the upside down, to show Its inclination for below: In vain; for a superior force Applied at bottom stops its course: Doom'd ever in suspense to dwell, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... of the poplars, where most exposed, the leaves stay till the last, those growing on the trunk below disappearing long before those on the spire, which bends to every blast. The keys of the hornbeam come twirling down: the hornbeam and the birch are characteristic trees of the London landscape—the latter reaches a great height and never loses its beauty, for when devoid of leaves the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... rudimentary. But gaze down for a moment from the cathedral platform upon the valley of the Arno, spread like a glowing picture at your feet, and see how immediately it resolves the doubt. Not, indeed, the valley of the Arno as it stands at present, thick set with tower and spire and palace. In order to arrive at the raison d'etre of Fiesole you must blot out mentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... mustard seed, would be thought a penurious, narrow-minded husbandman. The dandelions in the river-meadows, and the forget-me-nots along the mountain roads, you see at once they are put to no economy in space. Some seasons, too, our rye comes up here and there a spear, sole and single like a church-spire. It doesn't care to crowd itself where it knows there is such a deal of room. The world is wide, the world is all before us, says the rye. Weeds, too, it is amazing how they spread. No such thing as arresting them—some ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... the grey passing into blue, and the blue spaces widening. 'It will be a hot day,' she said to herself, and fell to thinking that a hot day was hotter on this hillside than elsewhere. At every moment the light grew more and more intense, till a distant church spire faded almost out of sight, and she was glad she had come up here to admire the view from the top of Market Street. Southwark, on the right, as black as Northwood, toppled into the valley in irregular lines, the jaded houses seeming ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... And lose their snowy summits in the skies; Above those mountains proud Olympus towers, The parliamental seat of heavenly powers. New to the sight, my ravish'd eyes admire Each gilded crescent and each antique spire, The marble mosques, beneath whose ample domes Fierce warlike sultans sleep in peaceful tombs; Those lofty structures, once the Christians boast, Their names, their beauty, and their honours lost; Those altars bright with gold and sculpture grac'd, By ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... Compass of about half a League every way, and 5 Leagues from the Main, between which and them lay other Islands. The most of them are barren rocks, and of these there is a very great Variety, some of them are of as small a Compass as the Monument in London, and Spire up to a much greater height; they lay in the Latitude of 36 degrees 57 minutes, and some of them are inhabited. At Noon they bore South 60 degrees East, distant 3 or 4 Leagues, and a Rock like a Castle ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... returning, as I thought, delivered from a dreadful hallucination, to the scene of duties which I longed to enter upon. It was a beautiful sunny evening, everything looked serene and cheerful, and I was delighted. I remember looking out of the window to see the spire of my church at Kenlis among the trees, at the point where one has the earliest view of it. It is exactly where the little stream that bounds the parish passes under the road by a culvert, and where it emerges ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... was supposed, would bring with them as many more. They marched out of Vihiers early on the Tuesday morning, having remained there only about a couple of hours, and before nightfall they saw the spire of Doue church. They then rested, intending to force their way into the town early on the following morning; but they had barely commenced their preparations for the evening, when a party of royalists ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... perspective and the latter by two or three half-circular strokes. That there may be no confusion between church and inn, the possibility of which is suggested by the fact that several of the latter are adorned with spire-like embellishments, the sixteenth-century cartographer told which were which in so many words. It is by close attention to the letter-press, and by observing the frequent appearance of names which have age-long association ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... were only a short march from Touggourt, and could have reached there by dark, Maieddine nevertheless ordered an early halt. The tents were set up by the Negroes among the dunes, where not even the tall spire of Temacin's mosque was visible. And he led the little caravan somewhat out of the track, where no camels were likely to pass within sight, to a place where there were no groups of black tents in the yellow sand, and where the desert, in all ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... tender farewell to my young friends. We headed for Cressensac, where we were joined by Captain Gault, my father's aide-de-camp. While the coach was being got ready, Spire, my father's old servant, who knew that his master intended to travel day and night, made up packages ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... eight o'clock in the evening. A light, grey fog hung over the background of the streets, and the line of the housetops was almost lost in the morose shadows that fell from a soot-coloured sky. Here and there a chimney-stack or the sharp spire of a church tore the muslin-like curtains of descending mist; and vague as the mist were her thoughts. The streets twisted, wriggling their luminous way through slime and gloom, whilst at every turning ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... He rather stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Trilbardou, Penchard, Monthyon, Neufmortier, Chauconin, and in the foreground to the north, in the valley, just halfway between me and Meaux, lies Mareuil-on-the-Marne, with its red roofs, gray walls, and church spire. With a glass I can find where Chambry and Barcy are, on the slope behind Meaux, even if ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... of light. Milk-white clouds capped the western hills. Nearer, dotted peacefully with farms, red barns and dark, straggling clumps of evergreen, the rolling valley stretched unevenly among intersecting lines of trees. At the foot of a hill rose the spire of the village church. To the south a crystal blaze of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of the war-time picture of the church on page 62 may be his. The tablet to his memory has long since been destroyed, and every vestige of his tombstone has disappeared, but nature, not forgetting his generous gifts to the old church, has sent up a spire-shaped cedar to mark his grave. Colonel Hamtramck died April 21, 1858, at ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... the church spire of Pajala, rested there, and on the 24th of May, as I was travelling on the Torne River, I passed once more the Arctic Circle. It was raining. I was told that it was the first rain that had ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... the first; each had a chimney built out into the floor in the Dutch manner; and being alongside, each had the same prospect from the window of the top of a tree below us in a little court, of a piece of the canal, and of houses in the Hollands architecture and a church spire upon the farther side. A full set of bells hung in that spire, and made delightful music; and when there was any sun at all, it shone direct in our two chambers. From a tavern hard by we had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mother of the Virgin Mary and in compliment to Princess Anne." The site was a piece of ground known as Kemp's Field, and the architect selected was Sir Christopher Wren. The building is in all respects like others of its period, but has a curious spire added later. This has been described as "two hogsheads placed crosswise, in the ends of which are the dials of the clock," and above is a kind of ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... mountains inland; and, as they neared Grosse Isle and the quarantine ground, the soft beauties of civilisation were superadded. Many ships of all nations lay at anchor; the shore was dotted with white farmhouses, and neat villages clustered each round the glittering spire of ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... then she passed groups of people homeward bound, or English soldiers sauntering along the street, and then turning a corner she gave a little exclamation of delight, for there, close at hand, were the brick walls of Christ Church, its graceful spire rising against the clear April sky. And now home was near at hand and Betty quickened her pace. She had almost forgotten her mother's ruined bonnet and the fact that she had no excuse to give for borrowing the things for Gilbert's play without permission. All she could think of was ...
— A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia • Alice Turner Curtis
... promontory to watch the sunrise. Deep down in the canyons below, darkness still lingered. Slowly the world emerged from the shadows like a photographic plate developing and disclosing its images in the darkroom. Beyond the promontory a great spire lifted high above the canyon; I climbed to its top. Above the spire was a higher crag. Again I climbed up. Up and up I climbed until almost noon. Each new vantage point revealed new glory; every successive ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... attempt to deny; but, in another environment, how different might it not appear,—as for instance placed beside Amiens, where in one particular alone, the mere height of nave and choir, it immediately dwindles into insignificance. Under such conditions its graceful spire becomes dwarfed and attenuated. Need more be said?—The writer thinks not, since the present work does not deal with the comparative merits of any two cathedrals or of national types; but the suggestion should serve to demonstrate how impossible it is for any writer, however ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... speaks as the roll of thunder that cannot be denied—you must hear it; and how can you shut your ears to what this lark sings, this violet tells, this little grey shell writes in the curl of its spire? The bitter truth that human life is no more to the universe than that of the unnoticed hill-snail in the grass should make us think more and more highly of ourselves as human—as men—living things ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... would continue quaffing, corowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long." One of his best friends has corroborated his statement, giving at the same time a graphic description of his physical appearance: "Hee inherited more vertues than vices," wrote Nash, "a jolly long red peake [beard] like the spire of a steeple he cherisht continually, without cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewell, it was so sharp and pendant ... He had his faultes ... Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subject to?... A good fellow he was ... In a night and ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... lank, mossy trunks, toadstools and rank ferns, protruding roots, matted bushes, and rotting carcasses of fallen trees. A generation ago one might find here and there the rugged trunk of some great pine lifting its verdant spire above the undistinguished myriads of the forest. The woods of Maine had their aristocracy; but the axe of the woodman has laid them low, and these lords of the ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... at Wellington College that he was born, in the Master's Lodge, in a sunny bedroom, in the south-east corner of the house; one of its windows looking to the south front of the college and the chapel with its slender spire; the other window looking over the garden and a waste of heather beyond, to the fir-crowned hill of Ambarrow. My father had been Headmaster for twelve years and was nearing the end of his time there; and I was myself ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is rich in specimens of ecclesiastical architecture, and possesses some very handsome churches. Of the four whose towers and spires are seen within the circle of the Severn, St. Mary's is the most interesting. Its site is 100 feet above the river, and its tall and graceful spire is a landmark seen for many miles. The lower portion of the tower, the nave, transepts, and doorway, are of the 12th century, whilst other portions are of the 15th and 16th. The interior, with its clustered columns, decorated capitals, moulded arches, and ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... these old stories reminds me that I have something that may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... small turrets with pinnacles at the angles and center of each front tower. From the four turrets at the angles spring two arches, which meet in an intersecting direction, and bear on their center an efficient perforated lanthorne, surmounted by a tall and beautiful spire: the angles of the lanthorne have pinnacles similar to those on the turrets, and the whole of the pinnacles, being twelve in number, and the spire, are ornamented with ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the cloudless blue sky rose the pinnacles of Santa Croce, the domes of San Spirito, of the Baptistery, of the Cathedral; sharply defined in the clear atmosphere were the airy, light Campanile of Giotto, the more slender brown tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the spire of Santa Maria Novella. Northward beyond the city rose the heights of Fiesole, and to the east the green hills dotted all over with white houses, swept away into ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... dangerous." At the north-east end stood the parish pound-house. St. Stephen's Church and Schools are handsome, in a decorated Gothic style, and were built in 1847 by Ferrey, at the cost of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. The spire rises to a height ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... track of the glass-and-steel structures that had been springing up daily along the Fifth-Madison Thruway. When Tom and Livia stepped out of the cab in front of 320, he wasn't surprised that the building—an odd, cylindrical affair with a pointed spire—was strange to him. But he was taken aback to realize that all sixty floors were ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... garrisoned at home, Day patient following day, Old Charleston looks from roof, and spire, and dome, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... from between two clumps of trees, might be seen the span of a light and elegant arch, from under which the river gently wound away to the right; and beyond this, on the left, about a hundred yards from the bank, rose up the slender spire of the parish church, out of the bosom of the old beeches that overshadowed it, and threw a solemn gloom upon the peaceful graveyard at its side. About two hundred yards again to the right, in a little green shelving dell beneath the house, stood Mr. Sinclair's modest white ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... away, is observed the weathercock of a chapel-spire, plainly indicating the location of the European quarter. Taking a branch road leading in that direction, I discover a party of English and native gentlemen playing a game of lawn-tennis. Arriving on the scene just as the game is breaking ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... often through the entire heated term. The swelling summit of Mount Pequakett rises at the north-east of the village, a lone sentinel, guarding the gateway of the mountains with bold and unchanging brow. On the western side extends a long range of rocky hills, with the single spire-like summit of Chocorua far beyond, piercing ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... that the next time he came to the station would probably be at the end of term, when his schoolboy days would be over. He leaned against a gate, and looked long at the green quiet hill, with its tall spire and embosoming trees, till he ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... own plot of ground. It was apparently a village of one street, and over the roofs of the houses opposite he saw in the distance the white waves of the sea. What astonished him most was a church with its tapering spire at the end of the street—a wooden church such as he had seen in remote American settlements. The street was deserted, and there were no signs of life in ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... growing earnestness, "for all my life long I have been doing things that must have supplied you with material. Have you not heard that I have built a school-house; the wing of a hospital; two—yes, three—small churches, and the greater part of a large one, the spire of ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... familiar to almost every one, that in a flower the relative position of the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, as well as their intimate structure, are intelligible on the view that they consist of metamorphosed leaves, arranged in a spire. In monstrous plants, we often get direct evidence of the possibility of one organ being transformed into another; and we can actually see in embryonic crustaceans and in many other animals, and in flowers, that organs, which when mature become extremely different, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... what I can see from my barred window. Far down below me there is a rusty tin roof, it looks like as if it might belong to a sort of shed. In front and to the right there are windowless walls; to the left, at a little distance, I can see a slender church spire, greenish in colour, probably covered with copper, and before the church there are two ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... of these is divided into several pieces, which pieces have distinct names in the sailor's vocabulary. Thus, the "main-mast," to a sailor, is not the whole of that long straight stick which rises up out of the middle of a ship's deck, and points like a spire to the sky. On the contrary, the main-mast terminates a little above the platform just mentioned, and which, from that circumstance, is designed the "maintop." Another mast, quite distinct from this, ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... that shows you're not a pillar of the Church, old son. If you took the faintest interest in your particular place of worship, or in any Anglican place of worship, you'd know that whenever you want anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre, Tidborough. Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod to a desk—Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best. No, they're the great, the great, church and school-furnishing people. 'Ecclesiastical ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... is circular, and encompassed all round with three rows of ramparts made of timber, one within the other, "framed like a sharp spire but laid across above, the middlemost is made and built as a direct line but perpendicular, the ramparts are framed and fashioned with pieces of timber laid along the ground, well and cunningly joined together[50]." This inclosure is about two roods high, and has but one gate of entrance, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn, and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city, releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning chants coming from many a church ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the principal temple of Benares—the temple of Bisheshwar, sacred to Shiva under this name, which means Lord of All. This temple is in the midst of a quadrangle, covered in with a roof; over it are a tower, a dome, and a spire. The tower and dome glitter in the sun like masses of burnished gold, and on this account it is called the Golden Temple. Natives will tell you that it is covered with plates of solid gold, but in fact it is merely gilded with gold leaf, spread over plates of copper overlaying the stones beneath. ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... took a careful look in every direction. It was level, open country all about them, dotted here and there with farmhouses, and in the distance the spire of a village church rose above the clustering houses ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the Face! it is not given every man to love precisely in this troubadourish fashion. Even the most generous person cannot render to love any more than that person happens to possess. I have read in an old tale how the devil sat upon a cathedral spire and white doves flew about him. Monks came and told him to begone. 'Do not the spires show you, O son of darkness' they clamored, 'that the place is holy?' And Satan (in this old tale) replied that these spires were capable of various interpretations. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... the graceful arch extended, Above the pile the rounded dome arose, The soaring spire to heaven's high vault ascended, The loom hummed loud as bees at ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... amid them; while on the other side, towards the ocean, he saw before him a wide and smiling valley, with a stream meandering through it, and green meadows and groves of trees, from among which a church spire reared its pointed summit; and near it a cheerful village of white-washed cottages and other dwellings of more pretension; and there were sheep feeding, and cattle wending their way slowly homeward, all speaking of ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... weight. He had a large court to range in, and he dragged the piece of iron about after him all day. When he was a year and a half old he flew away, with the chain and iron attached to his leg, and perched on the spire of the church of Santo Tomas, whence he was scared away by the carrion hawks. On alighting in the street, a Negro attempted to catch him for the purpose of bringing him home; upon which he seized the poor creature by the ear, and tore it completely off. He then attacked ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... a solitary, spectral-looking horseman was cantering noiselessly out of it towards them. The evening had almost begun; the sky had changed to a delicate green tint, merged towards the west in a dusky crocus, against which the Memorial spire stood out sharp and black; from South Kensington came the sound of a church bell ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... had seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... sword in his hand, and his gold and silver treasures about him. There is a grey old castle upon the top of that mighty mound; and yonder, rising three hundred feet above the soil, from among those noble forest trees, behold that old Norman master-work, that cloud-encircled cathedral spire, around which a garrulous army of rooks and choughs continually wheel their flight. Now, who can wonder that the children of that fine old city are proud of her, and offer up prayers for her prosperity? I myself, who was ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
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