Now, when the Belgians and their neighbors received the spire thus from the fatherland, they at once began to express in it the joy of their worship by all the embroidery and tender imagery and grotesque conceits it was capable of receiving.  They varied as many changes on it as they did on their bells.  They concealed the first springing of their spires behind clustering pinnacles, flying-buttresses, canopied niches with gigantic statues, galleries with battlements and parapets pierced and mantled in lacework of flamboyant tracery, pointed gables alive with crockets and finials, and long, quaint dormers,—­all with a bewildering intricacy of enrichment.  And they inherited from the Germans a love for the gargoyle, which haunted the springing of the spire at the corners with visions of very hideous diablerie.  It may well be believed that these florid builders did not suffer the spire to arise serious and serene from the midst of this delicious tangle of architecture.  They tricked it out with all the frostwork of Gothic genius.  Not only did they use in its decoration spire-lights, crockets, ribs and cinctures, bands of gablets, and masses of reticulated relief, but, with wonderful skill, they pierced each face from base to apex in foliated patterns of great richness, so that the whole spire became a web of delicate open-work, through which the light was sprinkled in beautiful shapes, varying with every movement of the beholder.  Their plainer spires of wood they were fond of covering with glazed tiles of various tints arranged in quaint taste.  And they would vary the outline by making it curve inward, giving a fine sweep thus from the base to an apex of great slenderness.  Sometimes they would give it, with exaggerated refinement, the entasis of the Greek column.  There are instances of this last treatment both in France and England.

But it was not only in exuberance of enrichment and quaintness of form that these enthusiastic workmen uttered their inspirations.  They built their spires to a most amazing height.  Indeed, the loftiest steeples in the world arose in level tracts of country, where they could be seen at immense distances, as not only in Belgium and thereabout, but on the flat margins of the upper and lower Rhine, as at Strasburg and Cologne.  In these countries, and about the North of France, there was a generous rivalry as to which city should lift up highest the cross of God.  But as soon as the sacred passion for spire-building was corrupted by this new element of human emulation, some strange things happened.  The people of Beauvais, for instance, desiring to beat the people of Amiens, set to work, we are told, to build a tower on their cathedral as high as they possibly could.  The same thing had been done once before on the plains of Shinar.  One foresees the result, of course; “it fell, for it was founded upon the sand, and great was the fall thereof.”  And so with the good people of Louvain.  They built three spires to their cathedral, of which the central one reached the unparalleled height of five hundred and thirty-three feet, according to Hope, and the side-towers four hundred and thirty feet.  This tremendous group, however, fell, or, threatening destruction, was taken down, in 1604.  We remember what the Wanderer said so finely in the “Excursion":—­