“We must needs confess
  That ’tis a thing impossible to frame
  Conceptions equal to the soul’s desire;
  And the most difficult of tasks to keep
  Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”

But we find that ecclesiastical edifices were not the only ones which were adorned with this high building; for town-halls were not infrequently distinguished by immensely lofty spires, as at Brussels.  It is curious to see, however, how easily the less exalted impulses which erected them may be discovered.  They do not soar, they climb up panting into the sky, like the famous passage up through Chaos, in Milton, “with difficulty and labor hard.”  They have not the light, airy gliding upward of the religious spire, whose feeling George Herbert had in his mind, when he sang of prayer:—­

  “Of what an easy, quick accesse,
  My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly
  May our requests thine eare invade!”

Not so; but it is all human rivalry, a succession of diminishing towers, steps piled one above another, where the mind every now and then may stop to breathe, and then fight its way onward again;—­not an Ascension, like that from Bethany; rather the toil of a very human, though very laudable ambition.

Unfinished spires were in Europe very common legacies from generation to generation.  Descendants were called upon to embody the great conceptions of their forefathers.  But the ancestral spirit too often failed in the land, the wing of aspiration was broken, the crane rotted in its place, the great conceptions were forgotten, or lived only as vague and dreamy inheritances; and the half-completed spires stood like Sphinxes, and none knew their riddles!  They are very melancholy memorials.  Like the broken columns over the graves of the departed, fallen short of their natural uses, they seem only the funeral monuments of a race that is dead.  The empty air is stilled over them in expectation, and the imagination makes vain pictures, and fills out their crescent of splendid purposes.  They have been called “broken promises to God.”  Too often, perhaps, they were rather monuments of the feebleness of those who would scale heaven with anything but adoration upon their lips.  There were Ulm, indeed, and Cologne, and Mechlin, as artistic intentions, eminently grand and beautiful; and in the early part of the sixteenth century Belgium was famous for designs of open-work spires, which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all hitherto existing.  But it is worthy of note that at this period the purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men to the stars.  “Gay religions, full of pomp and gold,” could neither feel nor utter the grave tenderness of the early inspirations.  And