In my various excursions from Salisbury I was followed everywhere by the all-pervading presence of the towering spire.  Just what it was in that earlier visit, when my eyes were undimmed and my sensibilities unworn, just such I found it now.  As one drives away from the town, the roofs of the houses drop out of the landscape, the lesser spires disappear one by one, until the great shaft is left standing alone,—­solitary as the broken statue of Ozymandias in the desert, as the mast of some mighty ship above the waves which have rolled over the foundering vessel.  Most persons will, I think, own to a feeling of awe in looking up at it.  Few can look down from a great height without creepings and crispations, if they do not get as far as vertigos and that aerial calenture which prompts them to jump from the pinnacle on which they are standing.  It does not take much imagination to make one experience something of the same feeling in looking up at a very tall steeple or chimney.  To one whose eyes are used to Park Street and the Old South steeples as standards of height, a spire which climbs four hundred feet towards the sky is a new sensation.  Whether I am more “afraid of that which is high” than I was at my first visit, as I should be on the authority of Ecclesiastes, I cannot say, but it was quite enough for me to let my eyes climb the spire, and I had no desire whatever to stand upon that “bad eminence,” as I am sure that I should have found it.

I soon noticed a slight deflection from the perpendicular at the upper part of the spire.  This has long been observed.  I could not say that I saw the spire quivering in the wind, as I felt that of Strasburg doing when I ascended it,—­swaying like a blade of grass when a breath of air passes over it.  But it has been, for at least two hundred years, nearly two feet out of the perpendicular.  No increase in the deviation was found to exist when it was examined early in the present century.  It is a wonder that this slight-looking structure can have survived the blasts, and thunderbolts, and earthquakes, and the weakening effects of time on its stones and timbers for five hundred years.  Since the spire of Chichester Cathedral fell in 1861, sheathing itself in its tower like a sword dropping into its scabbard, one can hardly help looking with apprehension at all these lofty fabrics.  I have before referred to the fall of the spire of Tewkesbury Abbey church, three centuries earlier.  There has been a good deal of fear for the Salisbury spire, and great precautions have been taken to keep it firm, so that we may hope it will stand for another five hundred years.  It ought to be a “joy forever,” for it is a thing of beauty, if ever there were one.