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More "Spire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... question, and, in addition, a proposition boldly practical in the Kyrie, the spire of your Cathedral. The inspiration and structure of it are certainly admirable..."omnia excelsa tua et fluctus tui super me transierunt." Nevertheless, during these 300 bars, about, of a slow and almost continuous movement, do you not lose sight of the celebrant, who is obliged ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... air blew into the room, bringing with it a sort of powdery spray, which sprinkled their beards. They looked at the tall trees which were dripping with rain, at the broad valley which was covered with mist, and at the church spire in the distance, which rose up like a gray point in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... hearts of them torn-out: And chief in the chase his neck he perilled, On a lathy horse, all legs and length, With blood for bone, all speed, no strength; {120} —They should have set him on red Berold With the red eye slow consuming in fire, And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire! ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... bright 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 ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Thistle-Tassel, Dancing in the moonlight; Thistle-Tassel, Thistle-Tassel, Queen of fairy ones, I will give you street and spire, Boat, and bridge, and beacon fire, And a sound of merry music ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... I spied, A tree of stateliest growth, and yet undried, Green from the wood: of height and bulk so vast, The largest ship might claim it for a mast. This shorten'd of its top, I gave my train A fathom's length, to shape it and to plane; The narrower end I sharpen'd to a spire, Whose point we harden'd with the force of fire, And hid it in the dust that strew'd the cave, Then to my few companions, bold and brave, Proposed, who first the venturous deed should try, In the broad orbit of his monstrous eye To plunge the brand and twirl the pointed ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... of my last visit to Cedarville, I found myself approaching that quiet village again. As the church-spire came in view, and house after house became visible, here and there, standing out in pleasant relief against the green background of woods and fields, all the exciting events which rendered my last visit so memorable, came up fresh in my mind. I was yet ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... it was a simple thing, an unostentatious remembrance; no breaking, surely, of his father's conditions. Rodney loyally kept away and manfully stuck to his business, but every spire and frond and leaf of green in this winter wreath shed off the secret, magnetic meaning with which it was charged. Heart-light flowed from them, and touching the responsive sensitivity, made photographs ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Howard Morely leaned back in his seat, to glance down at the bay. Idly, he allowed his gaze to wander over the expanse of water between the two blunt points of land, then he looked back at the skeletonlike spire which jutted upward from the green hills he had just passed over. He could remember when that ruin had been a support for one of ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... the naked ice, the hues were wondrously splendid, and, mingling upon the sight, formed a kind of airy, rainbow-like veil that complicated the whole congregation of white shaft and many-tinctured spire, the marble column, the alabaster steeple into a confused but most ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... 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
... 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, you do not see piles, like Beauvais, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... and with 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
... 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 ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the low meadows are beginning to rise steadily from the vale stands the town of Pickering, dominated by the lofty stone spire of its parish church and by the broken towers of the castle. There is a wide street, bordered by dark stone buildings, that leads steeply from the river to the church. The houses are as a rule quite featureless, but we have learnt to expect ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... 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 passed over Todmorden, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... always shunned the port of London, I only knew the church through his pointing out its spire from on board. Perhaps I might recall, if it were any good to try, the way by which I went to it alone from the river; but how we two went from it to Riderhood's shop, I don't know—any more than I know what turns we took and doubles ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... from the flinty spire of a peak rising between them and a sun that was slowly wheeling into the clear sky, came scream after scream that echoed and billowed across the open lands as Terry Temple, seeing something of the truth, cried out in ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... o'clock they still slept. The moon had swung out from behind the high buildings and now hung just above the slender spire of Park Street Church, looking down into the deep, narrow street gulch. A cat picked her way among the graves, sprang noiselessly to the top of a flat tomb beneath the sparrows, and watched with me. The creature brought the wilderness with her. After ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities, love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... not 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. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... crosswise, with a fine spire, and might invite a traveller to survey it; but I, perhaps, wanted vigour, and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... spoke, the form of Satan loomed In sight, all crimson with reflections's fire, Like some tall tower or cathedral spire Touched by the dawn while all the earth is gloomed In mists and shadows of the night time. "Sire," Said Waterman, his agitable wick Still sputtering, "what calls you back so quick? It scarcely was a century ago You left us." "I have ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... rustic gentleness mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned aristocracy. Because, moreover, there is a far stronger effect of life, home and cheer from the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly limited numbers, assemble with and behind these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that spire out of the network and haze of living things in winter sleep. The plantings at the garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of course, lower than those farther back, I see among them, in this dream, the evergreen box and several kinds of ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... 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 of the protest entered by the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... busiest life, Not a stone's throw from the deadly strife Of the metropolitan mart, Old Trinity stands; her spire, like a hand, Points ever upward; her chimes demand From the hardened ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... 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, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... 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 of ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... troops whose loyalty to your Majesties has been in question; then on to secure a safe retreat in case our plan fails, which, pray God, it may not! Either Worms, where Monsieur de Conde is powerful, or Spire, whose Prince-Bishop is most devoted to your Majesties, will surely offer its hospitality and protection. It depends only on your Majesties' firmness to escape from this capital and captivity. Through letters to my wife" (Calvert hesitated slightly—'twas the first time he had so used ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... in the face, and finds this countenance in his memory. The man was right. He had, in fact, formed part of the gathering in the Rue Saint Spire. The ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... 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 shapes and ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... handmaid on each side Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair Damp from the river; and close behind her stood Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain, And labour. Each was like a Druid rock; Or like a spire of land that stands apart Cleft from the main, and wailed ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... attendants, in familiar conversation, about the throng that poured forth to meet her train. In the evening we roamed through the streets to look at the various illuminated buildings, but especially the glowing spire of the minster, with which, both near and in the distance, we could not ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... burned, but soon it was rebuilt. Again it was destroyed by fire, 1087, and a new edifice begun which was 200 years in completion. This church, old St. Paul's, was 590 feet long, and had a leaden-covered, timber spire, 460 feet high. In 1445 this spire was injured by lightning, and in 1561 the building was again burned. Says Mr. Baedeker, whose guidebook is indispensable in the hands of a traveler, "Near the cathedral stood the celebrated ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... 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 fill ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... pointed spire, rises blue in the distance; and distant ridges, like receding waves, rise into blueness, one after the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into space. In the midst of it all gleams the Welsh Harp Lake, like a ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... again, for the jagged ice-peaks were coming rather near. I held my breath as the little plane veered around a slender black spire and dropped toward a tiny scrap of smooth snow among the ice-hummocks. I might have spared my anxiety. Under Ray's consumately skilful piloting, the skids struck the snow with hardly a shock. We glided swiftly over the ice and came to rest just ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... of graceful and beautiful forms. They make bunches of flowers, from flakes and wires of silver, that counterfeit the delicate creations the frost weaves upon a windowpane; and we were shown a miniature silver temple whose fluted columns, whose Corinthian capitals and rich entablatures, whose spire, statues, bells, and ornate lavishness of sculpture were wrought in polished silver, and with such matchless art that every detail was a fascinating study and the finished edifice a wonder ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hotel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... Return to 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 ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... they were from the northern part of the forest or from beyond the Wye; neither Father Jerome nor his other lieutenant, John, was present. Windybank stretched himself on the grass just above the water, being determined to say nothing to any man. He fell to contemplating the tall spire of Westbury Church, which stood out like a blurred finger in the darkness. Meanwhile the ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Later, he saw the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. Again fortune favoured him in the matter of privacy, and presently drowsiness descended on his eyelids, which was not fully dispelled till the train ran into the gloom of ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... beauty of a bare rock, a down, a church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal water,—their necessity to the completion of a landscape. I recollect well having the value of a stern straight line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had become quite ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 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. On his right rose ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... yet boasting in its central heart a hundred yards or so of splendour, where the truculent new red brick Post Office sneers across the flagged market square at the new Portland-stone Town Hall, while the old thatched corn-market sleeps in the middle and the Early English spire of the Norman church dreams calmly above them. Once, I say, a Sleepy Hollow, but now alive with the tramp of soldiers and the rumble of artillery and transport; for Wellingsford is the centre of a district occupied by a division, which means twenty thousand men of all arms, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... commended by God 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 ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... your hairs are grey, under the wise new fishing-laws?—when Winchester apprentices shall covenant, as they did three hundred years ago, not to be made to eat salmon more than three days a week; and fresh-run fish shall be as plentiful under Salisbury spire as they are in Holly-hole at Christchurch; in the good time coming, when folks shall see that, of all Heaven's gifts of food, the one to be protected most carefully is that worthy gentleman salmon, who is generous enough to go down to the sea weighing ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... pavement behind it, Left behind it the walls of the town and the fresh-whitened towers. Thus drove Hermann on till he came to the well-known causeway. Rapidly, loitering nowhere, but hastening up hill and down hill. But as he now before him perceived the spire of the village, And no longer remote the garden-girt houses were lying, Then in himself he thought that here he would ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... mountains. The ledges on the 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 ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... three great peaks of Tahiti lording it over ranges of mountains and valleys; and on the other, the equally romantic elevations of Imeeo, high above which a lone peak, called by our companions, "the Marling-pike," shot up its verdant spire. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... of the realm. Its central tower, though then in an incomplete state, was much finer than it now is, as it had a handsome octagon above what now forms the central tower. The north western transept tower was also adorned with a lofty spire. This spire, which was of wood covered with lead, was taken down ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... he could see the spire of the little church on the hill, and when the steamer rounded the point, affording a full view of the town, and sounded her whistle as a signal for those on the shore to come to the pier, Toby could hardly restrain ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy's world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... and power have passed away; His goodly forests all are felled, And songs of mirth rise, clear and gay, Chaunted by youthful voices, where His battle-hymn once filled the air— Where blazed the lurid council fire, The village church erects its spire; And where the mystic war-dance rang, With its confused, discordant clang, While stern, fierce lips, with many a cry For blood and vengeance, filled the sky, Mild Mercy, gentle as the dove, Proclaims her rule of peace and love. And of his true and ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... the city. The long, spring, Sunday was drawing to its close. Above the roofs of the houses across the street, above the towering stories of the buildings in the down town districts, above factory chimneys, church steeples, temple dome, and cathedral spire, she saw the evening sky light with the glory of the passing day. Over a triumphant arch in the west, through which the sun had gone, a mighty cloud curtain of purple was draped, fold on fold, all laced ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... point out familiar monuments, the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, the square of the Louvre, the gilded dome of Napoleon's tomb, the crumbling Tour Saint Jacques, disfigured now with scaffolding for repairs, and the Sacre Cour, shining resplendent on ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... hills our childhood wist, Woods, hamlets, streams, beholding: The sun strikes through the farthest mist, The city's spire to golden. The city's golden spire it was, When hope and health were strong; But now it is the churchyard grass, We look upon the longest. Be pitiful, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... 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 displayed in ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... water dust, which sprayed and powdered the beards, and a smell of inundation. They were looking at the tall trees bending under the shower, the broad valley darkened by this outflow of the black low clouds[*], and in the distance the Church spire rising like a gray point ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... down on the blue and 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 and the tall rock, a little fire, from which a tiny ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a Letter of the Rev. Mr. J. Darwin, of Carleton Scroop in Lincolnshire, authenticates a curious fact of this kind. "When I mentioned to you the circumstance of crows or rooks building in the spire of Welbourn church, you expressed a desire of being well informed of the certainty of the fact. Welbourn is situated in the road from Grantham to Lincoln on the Cliff row; I yesterday took a ride thither, and enquired of the rector, Mr. Ridgehill, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 its oak-panelled ceiling, ornamented ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... From spire and barn, looked westerly The patient weathercocks; But even the birches on the hill 15 Stood motionless as rocks. No sound was in the woodlands Save the squirrel's dropping shell, And the yellow leaves among the boughs, Low rustling ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... sounding in my ear; when I behold their insolent carriage to the poor, their often base servility to the rich—I think the Establishment is indeed in a poor way, and both she and her sons appear in the utmost need of reformation. Turning away distressed from minster tower and village spire—ay, as distressed as a churchwarden who feels the exigence of white-wash and has not wherewithal to purchase lime—I recall your senseless sarcasms on the 'fat bishops,' the 'pampered parsons,' 'old mother church,' etc. I remember your strictures on all ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... 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
... the vassal, and now ... the 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 before—or rather to those ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... he beheld 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 ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... vestige 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 ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... slaves—when we see a dense population of freemen—when lovely cottages and improved farms arise upon the now deserted and sterile soil—and where now deep silence reigns, we hear the chimes of religion from the village spire;—will you not—will not every friend of his country, thank this Society for its patriotic labors! Yes! Kings might be proud of the effects which this Society will have produced. Far more glorious than all their ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... I heard the rushing breath Of ghost and witch and fool go whirling by. I followed them, under the phantom sphere Of the pale moon, along the Avon's near And nimbused flowing, followed to his bier— Who had evoked them first with mighty eye. And as I gazed upon the peaceful spire That points above earth's most immortal dust, I could have asked God for His starry Lyre Out of the skies to play my praise upon. I could have shouted, as, O Wind, thou must, "Here lies Humanity: kneel, ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... indifferent to the ardent life that ebbed and flowed across its many bridges. On its breast, the small, dark craft of the city nestled lazily; to right and left along its banks, the sun struck glints of gold and bronze from spire and monument; while, close against its sides, on the very parapet of its quays, there was in progress that quaint book traffic that strikes so intimate a note in the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... organic union and harmonious co-operation, a system of educational institutions consisting of (1) primary schools, to be supported by local taxation; (2) grammar schools, classical academies or local colleges; and (3) a State University, as roof and spire of the whole edifice. ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... the Black Hill it looks more like a 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 ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the grande place in the very heart of the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle- work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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
... or north bank, is St. Aspais, an elegant church of the 14th cent. surrounded by crocketed gabled chapels. By the side of the main entrance rises a buttressed square tower, terminating in a high peaked roof prolonged into a short spire. In the interior are some delicately sculptured canopy work and 8 windows with valuable old glass. A few yards off the main street is the Hotel de Ville with a round attached turret in each corner; and in the centre of the court ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... 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 forest of d'Armstadt; from this situation he made a motion to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... 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 an organ, and a gallery for choristers. In the centre of the chapel, embellished ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... lightning telegraph, was then an almost unbroken forest, save where the wide prairie rolled its billows of grass towards the western mountains, or was lost in the sterile, salt, and sandy plains of the southwest. No city raised to heaven spire, dome, or minaret; no plough turned up the rich, alluvial soil; no metal dug from the bowels of the earth had been fashioned into instruments to aid man in the arts of peace ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... 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 in embryonic crustaceans and in many other animals, and in flowers, that organs, which when mature become extremely different, are ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... of benefiting the freedmen, where the young teachers 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... 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 ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... and spears, and the dim shadowy waving of banners, as the knights and lords and men-at-arms passed to and fro along the battlements; and we could see too in the town the three spires of the three churches; and the spire of the Cathedral, which was the tallest of the three, was gilt all over with gold, and always at night-time a great lamp shone from it that hung in the spire midway between the roof of the church and the cross at the top of the spire. The ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... soaring lyric of the spire, Like the composite voice of all the town, The bells burst swiftly into singing fire That wrapped the building, and which showered down Bright cadences to flash along the ways Loud with the ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... a long drawn out cry. 'Li-i-isten!' was echoed back with a sort of desperation in the distance. 'Li-i-isten!' died away somewhere far, far away. I started. A tall golden spire flashed on my eyes; I recognised the fortress of St. Peter ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... the Leek parliamentary division of Staffordshire, England, 13 m. N.E. of Stafford, and the terminus of a branch line from Cresswell on the North Staffordshire railway. Pop. (1901) 5186. The Roman Catholic church of St Giles, with a lofty spire, was designed by Pugin and erected in 1846. The interior is lavishly decorated. There are considerable collieries in the neighbourhood, and silk and tape works in the town. In the neighbouring Froghall district limestone ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... 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 ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... stirred; when the sound of her light footfall was heard no more, there was complete silence. Below, the mists had gathered so thickly that now they spread across the valley one dead white sea of vapour in which village and woods and stream were all buried—all except the little church spire, that, still unsubmerged, pointed triumphantly to the sky; and what a sky! For that which yesterday had steeped us in cold and darkness, now, piled even to the zenith in mountainous cloud-masses, was dyed, every crest and summit of ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... in clusters on the wooden pillars; yet higher in the gutters along the roof; yet higher about the pigeon-cote; higher still over the skylights in the roof of the mairie; yet higher in the spire of St. Christopher's; and all this ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... populous and picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... let us propitiate Him; let us build Him a house, where we may chant our mournful songs." So the church arises,—in Germany, in France, in England,—solemn, mystical, massive, a type of sorrow, in the form of a cross, with "a sepulchral crypt like the man in the tomb, before the lofty spire pointed to the man who had risen to Heaven." The church is still struggling, and is not jubilant, except in Gregorian chants, and is not therefore lofty or ornamental. It is a vault. It is more like a catacomb than a basilica, for the world is buried deep in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... arch, column, and spire, and obelisk, and lofty terraces, and many-windowed palaces, rose in all directions from a mass of building which appeared to him each instant to grow more huge, till at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon. The sun lent additional lustre to the dazzling quays of white marble which apparently ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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, Dance your ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he would always say, in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"—being offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... up the spring wagon this morning and drove to the Centre to church. It's a sweet little white frame church with a spire and three Doric columns in front (or maybe Ionic—I always get ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... us in the market-place, and in the principal streets they will be seen rushing about as if 'on change,' or hurrying to 'catch the train for Paris,' like the rest of the world. A few only have eyes of love and admiration for the noble spire of the church of St. Pierre, which rises above the old houses and the market-place, with even a grander effect than any that the artist has been able to render in the illustration. 'St. Pierre, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... negro seek For pearls hid in some forlorn creek, We all pearls scorn, Save what the dewy morn Congeals upon some little spire of grass, Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass And gold ne'er here appears Save what the ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... view the ancient writings. The single copy is kept in a great vault, built of indestructible metals, and protectively sheathed to last for all Time. The spot above its burial place is marked by a tall spire of stone. It ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... gentle hearts; before the awful window at Whitehall, whence the martyr Charles 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 the young Virginian brothers ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... 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
... off" down wind. This idiotic method of leaving the ground resulted in his being barely able to rise above the roofs of the near-by village and brought him into direct contact with the church spire. The spire being of solid construction withstood the impact; the aeroplane did not. So Killem and his companions, together with the wrecked Handley-Page and one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight pounds of undetonated ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... curfew died away there was only the rustling of the plane trees in the old courtyard. The great Citadelle loomed above the smaller houses, half in shadow half in silver, nodding heavily to the spire of the Church, and well within sight of the sentinelle poplar that guarded the village from the forest and the mountains. Far away, these mountains now lowered their enormous shoulders to let night flow down upon the sleeping world. The Scaffolding that brought it had ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on my right, the sun going down on the left. The copper did not gleam, it was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces of later date and another shade of ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... keep out the 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 spire was adorned with three compartments of fine ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... after he has closed this book) he conjures up the idea he attaches to the name of its heroine, let him see before her, as she glides through the humble room—as she listens to the voice of him she loves—as she sits musing by the window, with the church spire just visible—as day by day the soul brightens and expands within her—still let the reader see within the same walls, greyhaired, blind, dull to all feeling, frozen to all life, that stony image of Time and Death! Perhaps then he may understand why they who beheld the real and living Fanny blooming ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the thirty-two storeys of the Park Row Building, it has the look of a small and dainty toy. Though Trinity Church, dedicated to the glory of God and the Astors, stands in an equally strange environment, it is less incongruous, as it is less elegant, than St Paul's. Its spire falls not more than a hundred feet below the surrounding sky-scrapers, and were it not for its graveyard it might escape notice. Now its graveyard is one of the wonders of America. Rich in memories of colonial days, it is as lucid a ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... son put his arms round her neck, and whispered to him not to speak. It was almost dark in the study now, and what little light was still filtering in at the window from the grey nightfall was obscured by the figure of the Missioner gazing out at the lantern spire of his new church. There was a tap at the door, and Mrs. Lidderdale snatched up the volume that Mark had let fall upon the floor when he emerged from the curtains, so that when Dora came in to light the gas and say that tea was ready, nothing ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... expecting I knew not what; a spire, a pump, a green, a winding street: my preconceived village in the air had immediately to be swept into space, and in its stead, behold the inn with its sign-post, and these half-dozen brick tenements, more or less cut to one square pattern! So this was all! ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... 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 St. Petro—" ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... 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
... the darkness of our country's crime and suffering be lifted. God will roll back the night of storm, and bring in the morning of joy. Its golden light will gild the city spire, and strike the forests of Maine, and tinge the masts of Mobile; and with one end resting upon the Atlantic beach and the other on the Pacific coast, God will spring a great rainbow arch of peace, in token of everlasting covenant that the land shall ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... to him and wonderful. But 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
... negro seek For gems, hid in some forlorn creek: We all pearls scorn, Save what the dewy morn Congeals upon each little spire of grass, Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass: And gold ne'er here appears, Save ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... 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 ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... 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 ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that camp I and wasted all its fire: And he who wrought that spell?— Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... landscape on a sunny day. The soil is thin, the trees are slender, and one sees not much luxury or comfort. Still, one does not usually see much of either on a flying train. We spent a night at Amiens, and had several hours for the old cathedral, the sunset light on its noble front and towers and spire and flying buttresses, and the morning rays bathing its rich stone. As one stands near it in front, it seems to tower away into heaven, a mass of carving and sculpture,—figures of saints and martyrs who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 had produced no change. Retaining ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... November nights and days. The constant features are the pines and cedars. Summer and winter alike these stand unchanged, types of constancy and vigor. Yet, though there is no change, one who loves them both can at a time of year see a certain variation. This comes with the spire-like cedars, that stand so erect and point ever heavenward in close-drawn robes of priestly solemnity, in early May. Then for a few brief days the glow of spring sunshine gets into their blood and they gleam with ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... village church among the trees, Where first our marriage vows were given, With merry peals shall swell the breeze And point with taper spire to Heaven. ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord softened or ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... its course, after some hours, amid the roar and smoke and bare ugliness of some huge manufacturing town; and the other to come through green fields to the quaint, quiet, dreamy-looking little city, whose place is marked, across the plain, by the noble spire of the gray cathedral rising into the summer blue. We come to such points in our journey through life,—railway-points, as it were, which decide not merely our lot in life, but even what kind of folk we shall be, morally and intellectually. A hair's breadth may make the deviation at first. Two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... its double row of little shops. Into 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 the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... 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 to the same ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of Cossethay. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... population and 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 the most part, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... spire that out-towers the crag, We plant the staff for our country's flag, We plant the shade, from the hot sun free— We plant all these when we ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... the middle 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 around. Everything about them suggested ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... golden evening sun glinting down upon our picturesque row of haymakers, nor did we cease until the angelus sounded from the village spire. Then Anton, Jakob, Moidel, their men and maids, fell devoutly upon their knees and thanked God that Christ Jesus had been born. These humble Tyrolese remember thrice daily to praise the Lord, as David did. With a hushed, subdued look upon their honest faces, they arose, and we joining ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... chair with every bone in his body aching like a magnetized wire-skeleton charged with pain, Stanton collapsed again into his pillows and sat staring—staring into the dying fire. Nine o'clock rang out dully from the nearest church spire; ten o'clock, eleven o'clock followed in turn with monotonous, chiming insistency. Gradually the relaxing steam-radiators began to grunt and grumble into a chill quietude. Gradually along the bare, bleak stretches of unrugged floor little cold draughts of air came creeping ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... most prominent is the Roman Catholic Church, a white frame building with two great towers; Mr. Coan's native church with a spire comes next; and then the neat little foreign church, also with a spire. The Romish Church is a rather noisy neighbour, for its bells ring at unnatural hours, and doleful strains of a band which cannot play either in time or tune proceed from it. The court-house, a large buff painted frame-building ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... new heavy tower. Such will be the fate of our steeple at Kington St. Michael; one cannot perswade the parishioners to goe out of their own way. [In another of Aubrey's MSS. (his "Description of North Wiltshire"), is a sketch of the tower and spire of the church of Kington St. Michael, shewing several large and serious cracks in the walls. The spire was blown down in 1703, its neglected state no doubt contributing to its fall. The following manuscript note by James Gilpin, Esq. Recorder of Oxford (who was born at Kington in 1709), may be ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... almost as bright as day, and the mystic rays from the realm of Luna, shining on gate, arch, column, spire, tower, temple and dome, revealed to us the ghosts of vanished centuries, and from the depths of the Coliseum there seemed to rise the shouts of a hundred thousand voices, cheering the gladiator from Gaul, who had just slain ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... which finds space and duration enough to multiply into 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... race might have been raised to the solitary spire that sprang up in the midst of them, the bearer of present consolation, the harbinger of future equality; but Holy Church at Marney had forgotten her sacred mission. We have introduced the reader to the vicar, an orderly man who deemed he did his duty if he preached each week two sermons, and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... with a heavy entablature supporting the arms of Great Britain,—"that and nothing more"; the doings of Inigo Jones in his water-gates and arches, with two or three orders intermixed; and the late achievements of Mr. Nash along Regent Street,—with the church spire, which has the attractiveness and symmetry of an exaggerated marlin-spike, for a vanishing point,—are of themselves enough to show that the people here have no taste, and no feeling for this department of the Fine Arts, however much they may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... himself his mighty race to run. Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind, A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind, Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, Of merriest days, of love and Islington, Kindling anew the flames of past desire; And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, To the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Polterham was hardly conscious of the stirrings of that new life which, in the course of twenty years, was to transform the town. In those days a traveller descending the slope of the Banwell Hills sought out the slim spire of Polterham parish church amid a tract of woodland, mead and tillage; now the site of the thriving little borough was but too distinctly marked by trails of smoke from several gaunt chimneys—that of Messrs. Dimes & Nevison's blanket-factory, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... familiar fields before me which we had yet to cross, with the Dieben winding through them under his low, red-brick bridges, and beyond the little clustered village with its grey church spire standing shoulder high above ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... scene that thus developed itself to the eyes of Wagner; but as his glance swept the country which rose amphitheatrically from the shore not a vestige of the presence of man could be beheld. No smoke curled from amidst the groves, no church spire peeped from amongst the trees; nor had the wilderness of nature been disturbed by ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... prostration? You have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city, and you will see in a moment the mediaeval relations between Church and State. The cathedral is the city. The first object you catch sight of as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Galt's house, and turning into Grace Street strolled leisurely in the direction of the Capitol Square. The night was sharp with frost and a rising wind drove the shadows on the pavement against darkened house-fronts, while behind a far-off church spire, a wizened moon shivered through a thin cloud. On the silence came the sound of fire bells ringing in ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... sways with such absolute rule. Few Broadway tableaux are so worthy of artistic preservation. Before, the vista of a money-changers' mart; above and below, a long, crowded avenue of metropolitan life; behind, the lofty spire, gothic windows, and archways of the church, and the central group as picturesquely and piously suggestive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... BRANCHING.—There are two distinct and readily recognized systems of branching. 1. The main stem is excurrent (Fig. 3) when the trunk extends as an undivided stem throughout the tree to the tip; this causes the spire-like or conical trees so common among narrow-leaved evergreens. 2. The main stem is deliquescent (Fig. 4) when the trunk divides into many, more or less equal divisions, forming the broad-topped, spreading trees. This plan is the usual one among deciduous trees. ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... people were still getting ready for the next day. I was at the deck-cabin window, smoking an evening pipe, looking at the tent that stood on the sandy piece of land beyond the pier. I could see the trees of the village, and the church spire against the sky, and I thought of the way I'd meant to come back to Greenough, when I left it to go "romping and roaming," as Sadler had said, and how now I was come home with ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... his intelligent remarks on men and 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 at ...
— 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
... 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 Roman decorations, and round ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... 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
... but the cliffs belong in fact to the mainland. . . . And now in a few minutes we come abreast of my parish—the Ile Lezan. . . . See, see!" He caught my arm as the tide raced us down through the Passage du Four. "My church—how her spire stands up!" He turned to me, his voice shaking with emotion. "You English are accustomed to travel. Probably you do not guess, monsieur, with what feelings I see again Ile Lezan—I, who have never crossed the Channel before nor ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... responsibility. If they belittle their work with children and pine for the kind of teaching which the virtuosos attempt to do, let them realize that they are in a sense the foundation of the structure, and although perhaps not as conspicuous as the spire which towers up into the skies, they are certainly of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... left, down yonder, lies Rouen, that large town with its blue roofs, under its pointed Gothic towers. They are innumerable, delicate or broad, dominated by the spire of the cathedral, and full of bells which sound through the blue air on fine mornings, sending their sweet and distant iron clang to me; their metallic sound which the breeze wafts in my direction, now stronger and now weaker, according as the wind ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... departing sun was on his face. The music of the birds was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him. Thatched roofs of poor men's homes were in the distance; and an old grey spire, surmounted by a Cross, rose up between ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... at 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
... Ault in New York was not a novelty, but a continuation of like phenomena in the Street, ever since the day when ingenious men discovered that the ability to guess correctly which of two sparrows, sold for a farthing, lighting on the spire of Trinity Church, will fly first, is an element in a successful and distinguished career. There was nothing peculiar in kind in his career, only in the force exhibited which lifted him among the few whose destructive energy ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the cathedral. Corinne wanted to go to the top of the spire, in spite of her high heels, and long dress which swept the stairs or was caught in a corner of the staircase; she did not worry about it, but pulled the stuff which split, and went on climbing, holding it up. She wanted ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... power than our own, working in us, which we know to be from God, and therefore inexhaustible and ever ready to help. That is foundation firm enough to build solid fabrics of hope upon, whose bases go down to the centre of all things, the purpose of God, and whose summits, like the upward shooting spire of some cathedral, aspire to, and seem almost to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... warring, blood-stained, triumphant Holland to the quiet city of Norwich and a quaint gabled house in Tombland almost beneath the shadow of the tall spire of the cathedral, which now for about a year had been the home of Lysbeth van Goorl and Elsa Brant. Here to Norwich they had come in safety in the autumn of 1573 just before the first siege of Leyden was ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... India ships lay at wharves covered with casks of madeira and boxes of tea and spices. Then we would put out in his little rowboat and pull away toward Jersey, and, after a plunge in the river at Cooper's Point, would lazily row back again while the spire of Christ Church grew dim against the fading sunset, and the lights would begin to show here and there in the long line of sombre houses. By this time we had grown to be sure friends, and a little help from me at a moment when I chanced to guess that he wanted money had made the bond yet stronger. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... sit on hills our childhood wist, Woods, hamlets, streams, beholding! The sun strikes, through the furthest mist, The city's spire to golden. The city's golden spire it was, When hope and health were strongest, But now it is the churchyard grass We look upon the longest. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... cared not to reply, But, heaving from his breast a deep-drawn sigh, 'Fly, Goddess-born! and get thee from the fire! The foes,' he said, 'are on the ramparts. Fly! All Troy is tumbling from her topmost spire. No more can Priam's land, nor Priam's ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... great and 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 ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... transversely striated species, with an acute elevated spire. We have named it after Mr. T. Phillips, who has assiduously collected many new ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... 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 the peaks of ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... Nollet. Dr. Franklin was 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 of attaining his object. Having constructed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... Forest Shades,' Sweet, from the heights of thy domain, When the grey ev'ning shadow fades, To view the Country's golden grain! To view the gleaming Village Spire Midst distant groves unknown to me; Groves, that grown bright in borrow'd fire, Bow o'er the peopled ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... drew a deep breath as if to throw off some physical oppression. Under the weathered archway, down the flagged steps and over the lawn. . . . How still it was, and how sweet! The milk-blooms in the spire of the acacia were beginning to turn faintly brown, but its perfume still hung in the valley air, mixed with the honey-heavy breath of a great white double lime tree on the edge of the stream. There were ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Richling was sitting, half 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
... passive demeanour. And they were 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
... touched her, but she could not permit expressions of men's faces to arouse her compunction, so she turned her eyes resolutely ahead towards the spire of the marble church. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... city's busiest life, Not a stone's throw from the deadly strife Of the metropolitan mart, Old Trinity stands; her spire, like a hand, Points ever upward; her chimes demand From ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... will climb the broad-backed hills, Hear the uproar of their joy; We will mark the leaps and gleams Of the new-delivered streams, And the murmuring rivers of sap Mount in the pipes of the trees, Giddy with day, to the topmost spire, Which for a spike of tender green Bartered its powdery cap; And the colors of joy in the bird, And the love in its carol heard, Frog and lizard in holiday coats, And turtle brave in his golden spots; While cheerful cries ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... valley, along which a river flowed; the remoter districts were pleasantly wooded, and only the murkiness in the far sky told that a yet larger centre of industry lurked beyond the horizon. Dunfield offered no prominent features save the chimneys of its factories and its fine church, the spire of which rose high above surrounding buildings; over all hung a canopy of foul vapour, heavy, pestiferous. Take in your fingers a spray from one of the trees even here on the Heath, and ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... sinking in and deadening all the faculties. But why should he think or notice? He hastily climbed the hill and turned across the dark-green fields, following the black cinder-track. In the distance, across a shallow dip in the country, the small town was clustered like smouldering ash, a tower, a spire, a heap of low, raw, extinct houses. And on the nearest fringe of the town, sloping into the dip, was Oldmeadow, the Pervins' house. He could see the stables and the outbuildings distinctly, as they lay towards him on the slope. Well, he would not go there many more times! ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... alone when there were so many possible friends. Just above Ludgate Railway Viaduct, as you go to St. Paul's, there is a church on your left, a Wren church, very plain, of white and blackened stone, and an odd lead spire at the top. It has hardly any ornament, but just over the central doorway, under a sort of pediment, there is a little childish angel's head, a beautiful little baby face, with such an expression of stifled bewilderment. It seems to say, 'Why should I hang here, covered with soot, with ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... riot of form and color, as the walled enclosure in which this remarkable edifice and its attendant structures stand. From the center of the marble-paved courtyard rises an enormous, cone-shaped prachadee, round at the bottom but tapering to a long and slender spire said to be covered with plates of gold. It certainly looks like a solid mass of that precious metal, and at daybreak and nightfall, when it catches the level rays of the sun, it can be seen from afar, shining and glittering above the gorgeously ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... strollings now at even-close Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long Her eyes were on the ground; 'tis July, strong Now; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... 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 barb'rous zeal of savage foes defac'd: ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... 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
... 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 voice so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... investments as the best means of remitting 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 summer ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... in the deepening twilight, the belt of sunshine was rapidly climbing toward the topmost palisades with the purple shadows in the gorge mounting, twisting and eddying in skeins of mist, twining up toward them. One spire ahead glowed golden. The cloud drifted down upon it, glooming and glowing on its sunset side. The crag pierced it, ripped it as it glided along, like the knife of a diver in the belly of a shark. A cold wind blew from the riven ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... up the Valley there were pointed out to us the Three Brothers, a triple group of rocks, three thousand eight hundred feet high. Cathedral Spire, Sentinel Rock, Yosemite and Lost Arrow Falls, and all the other points of interest that can be seen on ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... during my time, aroused the envy of the whole college by painting the steeple of the First Baptist Church during vacation; and when he finished the job his class numerals were painted in big letters on top of the ornamental knob that tipped the spire. At least, so he announced, and no rival class had the ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... 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
... 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 was ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... green bank there 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 here ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... evening sun Across the long-lit meads and distant spire: So sleep thou well—like his thy labour done; Rest in thy glory ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... receded from around it for yards—to an immense boulder in its base—by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red conglomerate. The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and measures nearly twelve feet in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... grand, and awful pile of gothic architecture, built by our William the Conqueror. It has two towers, one of which, is surmounted by a wooden spire covered with lead, and is of the prodigious height of 395 french feet, the other is 236 ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... source amid the 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 passed over ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... buildings mounting higher and higher year by year along the city horizon, marking the course of Broadway from the Battery, literally fulfilling the humor of Knickerbocker in not leaving space for a breath of air for the top of old Trinity Church spire. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... ripe, precipitate growth, and gain a years advance; but this is erroneous. Now if you gather them in moist weather, lay them a drying, and so keep them till you sow, which may be as soon as you please after Christmas. If they spire out before you sow them, be sure to commit them to the earth before the sprout grows dry, or else expect little from them: And whenever you sow, if you prevent not the little field mouse, he will be sure to have the ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... interesting aspect; indeed, it was difficult to get a 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 masonry spoke of comparatively recent ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... consummate work, the tower of St. Stephen's in Vienna. It is composed of three superimposed structures, gradually diminishing in solidity and massiveness from the square base to the high-springing octagonal spire, garlanded with thorny crowns. It is balanced at the south end of the facade by the pretty cupola and lantern of the Mozarabic Chapel, the work of the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... foolish ecclesiastical sect, retained for their shibboleth, joyless and powerless for all good. The very labyrinth of the grass and flowers of our fields, though dissected to its last leaf, is yet bitten bare, or trampled to slime, by the Minotaur of our lust; and for the traceried spire of the poplar by the brook, we possess but the four-square furnace tower, to mingle its smoke ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... from the summit sprang the Basilica, somewhat slender and frail, recalling some finely chased jewel of the Renascence, and looking very new and very white—like a prayer, a spotless dove, soaring aloft from the rocks of Massabielle. The spire, which appeared the more delicate and slight when compared with the gigantic inclines below, seemed like the little vertical flame of a taper set in the midst of the vast landscape, those endless waves of valleys and mountains. By the side, too, of the dense greenery ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 186 feet square, with the corners cut off. It measures eighty feet from its pedestal to its roof, and is surmounted by a dome also eighty feet high, measuring from the roof, and fifty-eight feet in diameter. Upon the summit of the dome is a spire of gilded copper twenty-eight feet high, making the entire structure 224 feet from the turf of the garden to the tip of the spire. All of the domes are shaped like inverted turnips after the Byzantine style. Four small ones surround the central dome, exact duplicates and one-eighth of its size, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... The town 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 its ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... that one (which is, moreover, very vague), and at the rate I am going, if I write these three or four, that will be the most I can do. I am like M. Prudhomme, who thinks that the most beautiful church would be one which had at the same time the spire of Strasbourg, the colonnade of Saint Peter's, the portico of the Parthenon, etc. I have contradictory ideals. Thence embarrassment, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... fair exemplification of the stolid 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 we may, with our grand, appropriate, and impressive indigenous kind ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... still small voices of the storm! Detached wafts and swirls were coming through the woods, with music from the leaves and branches and furrowed boles, and even from the splintered rocks and ice-crags overhead, many of the tones soft and low and flute-like, as if each leaf and tree, crag and spire were a tuned reed. A broad torrent, draining the side of the glacier, now swollen by scores of new streams from the mountains, was rolling boulders along its rocky channel, with thudding, bumping, ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... There were also the wood-pigeons of the elms in the 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 ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... During several days the tendrils, or internodes, or both, spontaneously revolve with a steady motion. The tendril strikes some object, and quickly curls round and firmly grasps it. In the course of some hours it contracts into a spire, dragging up the stem, and forming an excellent spring. All movements now cease. By growth the tissues soon become wonderfully strong and durable. The tendril has done its work, and has done ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... rest. Before dawn I had them send Paddy to me, and by the light of a new fire I looked at him. Ye Saints! What hair! It must have been more than a foot in length, and the flaming strands radiated in all directions from an isolated and central spire which shot out straight toward the sky. I knew what to do with his tatters, but that crimson thatch dumfounded me. However there was no going back now, so I set to work upon him. Luckily my wardrobe represented three generations of O'Ruddy ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... as did the clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain half-formed sentiment; it is the outrush into manifestation of a grand emotion rooted deep in the knowledge of fact. The man who feels such devotion as this is one who knows in whom he has believed; ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... and bade him mount with him; he would see him on his way. Andrew did, and fell asleep in the stranger's arms. When he awoke he lay on this hill, where the cross has stood ever since, heard the cattle low and saw the spire of his church in the village where the vesper bells were ringing. Many months went by before his fellow-pilgrims reached home. Holy Andrew lived six hundred years ago. A masterful man was he, beside a holy one, who bluntly told the king the truth when he needed it, and knew how to ward the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... little hill, and saw the spire of a steeple, and the skirts of a country town, which a passenger told us ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... each new face or scene; and the kind fingers which did the pasting-in; and the care with which we made portrait and landscape fit into and illustrate one another. And what memories, what impressions, strong and clear as yesterday's, clung to each succeeding view! The Spire—that "pinnacle perched on a precipice"—with its embosoming trees, as one had so often seen it from the North-Western Railway, while the finger of fate, protruding from the carriage window, pointed ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... and teach Shall lift its spire on every hill, Where pious men shall feel and preach Peace, mercy, tolerance, good-will; Music of bells on Sabbath days, Round the whole earth shall gladly rise; And one great Christian song of praise Stream sweetly upward to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... much natural anxiety to see the new owner, and we are all excited about the event of his coming. Even I am, though I own my own estate, which, though adjacent, is quite apart from Castra Regis.—Here we are now in new ground for you. That is the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and when we leave that we shall be getting close to the old Roman county, and you will naturally want your eyes. So we shall shortly have to keep our minds on old Mercia. However, you need not be ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... cattle browsing peaceful in the meads; Who only wakes to consciousness, when full A burst of sunshine from the sinking orb Smiting the flood first strikes his dazzled sight;— So to the present hour am I recalled By yon red sun-light flaming up the spire, And vane that sparkles in the warm blue heaven And that ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... beautiful Psalms, which took his companion's mind back to his native mountains, and the white spire of the village church where he had worshipped with his mother. The hard lines melted in his face as he listened, but Paul fell upon a bitter verse, and the agent's conscience began to trouble him. He could not look ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... nor spoke. Without a murmur or complaint they stood facing the frowning west. Suddenly the silence was interrupted by a low volcanic rumble. The earth heaved, and rolled, and far away in the suburbs of the city the spire of a public building fell with a loud crash. A groan swept from mouth to ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... 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 ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Anne's was so named "after the 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 pyramid, ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... white-throated sparrow, tree sparrow, junco, winter wren, golden-crowned kinglet, brown creeper, and even the solitary robin. The sparrow hawk and the sharp-shinned hawk may visit the vicinity to feed upon the other feeders. On the first of January I saw a sparrow hawk sitting on the spire of a church in the heart of a city of eighteen thousand people. After selecting a victim from the sparrows on the street below, he calmly spread his wings and pounced upon him, or with no effort at concealment chased the bird whose ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... a gleam of light from some library or sitting-room window, accompanied by the tones of a piano or guitar,—or sound of laughing voices. And the house of God stood silent, dark and cold, with the figure of the Christ upon the window and the spire, like a giant ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... 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 last ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... The lower end of the conductor is soldered to a copper plate buried in the moist subsoil, or, if the ground is rather dry, in a pit containing coke. Sometimes it is merely soldered to the water mains of the house. The upper end rises above the highest chimney, turret, or spire of the edifice, and branches into points tipped with incorrosive metal, such as platinum. It is usual to connect all the outside metal of the house, such as the gutters and finials to the rod by means of soldered joints, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... in a happy frame of mind, with her taper and a bouquet of flowers. She knelt before the priest. He took the sacred image and presented it to her; but scarcely had it touched the lips of the orphan when a terrible peal of thunder rent the heavens, and a bolt of lightning struck the spire of the church, extinguishing her taper as well as the altar lights. This was a most unlucky coincidence for the terrified girl; and, cowering like a lost soul, she crept out of the church. The people were in consternation. "It was all true, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... exception, not 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
... the morning train looked down upon the beauty at his feet and felt its loveliness blindly. A passing thrill of wonder and devotion fled through his fourteen-year-old soul as he regarded it idly. Down there was home and all his interests and loyalty. His eyes dwelt affectionately on the pointing spire and bell tower. He loved those bells, and the one who played them, and under their swelling tones had been awakened new thoughts and lofty purposes. He knew they were lofty. He was not yet altogether sure that they were his, but they were there in his mind for him to think ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... 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 gave to jagged ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... dream By day or night Lives in that stream Of lovely light. Here is the earth, And there is the spire; This is my hearth, And that is my fire. From the sun's dome I am shouted proof That this is my home, And that is my roof. Here is my food, And here is my drink, And I am wooed From the moon's brink. And the days ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... 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
... ghostly radiance of starlight and painted walls. Tharon, riding ahead, went unerringly forward as if she traveled the open ways of the Valley floor. She turned from the main canyon toward the left and passed the mouth of Old Pete's snow-bed. Between this and that standing spire and pinnacle she went, with a strong certainty that presently stirred Billy ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... was printed over the door. Willy asked the office-boy if there were any letters, and they went upstairs. The windows of the front room were in view of a church spire, and overlooked a little shadowy cemetery; and at one window Cissy sat, the little crutches by her side, watching the children ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... view in all directions was magnificent. Wherever the eye turned, it met knolls, and mounds, and fields, and picturesque groves, with here and there a substantial farm-steading, or a little hamlet, with its modest church-spire pointing ever upwards to the bright sky. Cattle and sheep lowed and bleated in the meadows, while gentle murmurs told that a rivulet flowed along its placid course at ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... significance which you will find in what at first seems chance, in all noble histories, as soon as you can read them rightly,—that the statue of Athena Polias was of olive-wood, and that the Greek temple and Gothic spire are both merely the permanent representations of useful wooden structures. On these two first arts follow building in stone,—sculpture,—metal work,—and painting; every art being properly called "fine" which demands the exercise of the full faculties of heart and intellect. For though ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... 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 spring to ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... too. At one place a tall church spire, topped by a copper cross, was blazing with sunshine, and certain windows of the high buildings also began to flame. A pink cloud lay asleep in the blue lap of heaven, and there was a single star, like ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... straight line of the Houses of Parliament, as seen from the Lambeth Embankment, broken only by the two stark and stiff erections at each end. The two towers at the west end of Canterbury were not always uniform. At the northern corner an old Norman tower formerly uplifted a leaden spire one hundred feet high. This rather anomalous arrangement must have had a decidedly lopsided effect, and it is probable that the appearance of the cathedral was changed very much for the better when the spire, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... at the blazing wooden church-spire where it stood enveloped in flames as though wrapped in an inflated glittering cloak. Dully he let his eyes wander over the hedges and fences; everything seemed unreal, as things seen across a distant wave or a downpour of rain, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Oaklawn," said Frank, pointing to the spire of a church in the distance. "We cannot go much ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... great truth, and all have sustained it. And where there is any religious sentiment amongst men at all, this sentiment incorporates itself with the law. Every thing declares it. The massive cathedral of the Catholic; the Episcopalian church, with its lofty spire pointing heavenward; the plain temple of the Quaker; the log church of the hardy pioneer of the wilderness; the mementos and memorials around and about us; the consecrated graveyards, their tombstones and epitaphs, their silent vaults, their mouldering contents; all attest it. The ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... square central tower one side only is now remaining. This tower was despoiled of its spire in 1557. The Choir and Lady-Chapel are almost entirely gone. They were of pointed architecture; and it appears that they were erected during some of the latter years of the thirteenth century, or at the commencement of ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... 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 was then no railway, but only the quiet fields ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 'Afraid you shall fall?' Ah! don't be a craven, be bravest of all. Now up and now down, now away to yon spire: Go on: don't be frightened: fly higher ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... and higher, above each spire, Till lost to sight is the tallest steeple, With the winds you chase in a valiant race, Looping, swooping, where mountains are grouping, Hailing them comrades, in place of people. Oh, vast is the rapture the bird man knows As into the ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... unsuccessfully. Fatigue parties dug trenches in the snow, without the walls, by way of exercise or bravado. Sentinels at the Block House and other exposed points were frequently frostbitten. A kind of sentry-box was fixed on a pole thirty feet high, at Cape Diamond. Thence could be seen the tin spire of St. Foye Church, but not the Plains of Abraham, beyond Gallow's Hill, where the besiegers lay in force. Over the American camp the red-flag waved. Some thought it was the bloody flag, by way of threat. But it was no more than a signal to the prisoners within the ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... year by year until the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... cloud of smoke for 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 right in her bearings; so the skipper gave orders to ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... waters of Lake Lucerne mirrored the glowing colors of the mountain-peaks beyond its farther shore, and nearer, among the foothills of old Pilatus itself, a little village nestled among green trees, its roofs clustered about a white church-spire. Now the bells in the steeple began to ring, and the sound floated out across the green fields spangled with yellow daffodils, and reached Mother Adolf where she stood. Bells from more distant villages soon joined in the clamor, ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the 27th of August, as I stood on the cathedral spire, the sun lay warm upon the Alps, and Mont Blanc shone in the distance. "It is time to go," I said to myself; and descending, I hurried to my hotel and packed a gripsack. The night express via Mont Cenis ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... goes out for its airing. No important line of demarcation separates the old staid section of town from the new and brighter one. Major Trimble, President of the Jordan Bank & Trust Company, accepts deposits from both sections with strict impartiality; the spire of the Methodist Episcopal Church is the Sunday lodestone to folk on both sides of town, as well as for much of the country round. They talk mainly of farms, of cattle and of the weather on the streets of Jordan; ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... this Bursley built itself a new Town Hall (with a spire, and a gold angel on the top in the act of crowning the bailiwick with a gold crown), and began to think about ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Exchange, or Boersen, built by Christian IV. It is the most picturesque edifice in the city, though the interior is entirely commonplace. It is long and very narrow, and ornamented with a vast number of figures cut in the stone, with elegantly-wrought portals at the entrances. But the spire is the most remarkable portion of the building, and consists of four dragons, the heads at the apex looking towards the ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... 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, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... cities, pleaded, traded, and studied in security. Many of our noblest architectural monuments belong to that age. Then rose the fair chapels of New College and of Saint George, the nave of Winchester and the choir of York, the spire of Salisbury and the majestic towers of Lincoln. A copious and forcible language, formed by an infusion of French into German, was now the common property of the aristocracy and of the people. Nor was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls rang out from distant ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... brow of the Big Hill, he saw at its eastern foot the village church, a plain brick building with a decaying spire. Its side was perforated by four tall arched windows. Each was a memorial window of stained glass, which gave the building a black look from the outside. As Peter walked down the hill toward the church he heard the and somewhat nasal ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... principal streets and thoroughfares of the town emptied themselves. It was adorned by public buildings and other handsome edifices, and the tall steeple of St. Martin's with its beautiful open-work spire, lighted with the first rays of the midsummer sun, looked tranquilly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... others turned him from the doors of his own France, he still reigned over the 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 overcoat. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... event, he moved his horse slowly towards a combe, and looked out over a noble expanse—valley, field, stream, and church-spire. As he gazed, he saw seated at some distance a girl reading. Not far from her were two boys climbing up and down the combe. He watched them. Presently he saw one boy creep along a shelf of rock where the combe broke into a quarry, let himself drop upon another shelf below, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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, and the sounds of the morning ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... fields before me which we had yet to cross, with the Dieben winding through them under his low, red-brick bridges, and beyond the little clustered village with its grey church spire standing shoulder high ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... few 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 Bishop at ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... sluices, in time to save the rest of the household. Some of the roofs of the hamlet of Sandtoft stood above the waters; and the whole upper part of the chapel used by the foreigners; and many might easily have found a refuge there. Further off, a conspicuous object was the elegant crocketed spire of one of the beautiful Lincolnshire churches, standing high, as if inviting those who were dismayed to come and save themselves in the air from the dangers of the waters. Oliver wondered whether any sufferers were now watching ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... 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 ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... place and time in the world where and when it seems easy to "go into something" it is in Broadway on a spring morning, when one is walking city-ward, and has before him the long lines of palace-shops with an occasional spire seen through the soft haze that lies over the lower town, and hears the roar and hum ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... him. He halted, looking up at the tree-tops. Twig, branch, and trunk glowed with the fire of diamonds through a lacy necking of hoar frost. Every tree had put on a jacket of ice and become as a fountain of prismatic hues. Here and there a dead pine rose like a spire of crystal; domes of deep-coloured glass and towers of jasper were as the landmarks of a city. Allen climbed the shore, walking slowly. He could see no track of sleigh or dog or any living thing. A frosted, icy tangle of branches arched the trail—a gateway ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... of the lake, to the east, the land continues to rise, in accelerated assault, first in long lustrous leaps of glacier-polished granite, then in a chaos of dome and spire, and finally breaks up against the sky in a serrated edge like the top-crest of a great wind-flagellated wave which, attacking Heaven, should have been suddenly petrified ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... different states: thus 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 ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... corn-lands: the most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Church spire then I saw, An' I wor rare an' fain, Fer near it stood t'owd parsonage— I ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... afternoon of the second day's dry drive, but we finally scaled the last divide, and there, below us in the valley of the South Platte, nestled Ogalalla, the Gomorrah of the cattle trail. From amongst its half hundred buildings, no church spire pointed upward, but instead three fourths of its business houses were dance halls, gambling houses, and saloons. We all knew the town by reputation, while the larger part of our outfit had been in it before. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... days, when I was building my new church, and talking about the tower and spire we were going to erect, an elderly Christian lady who was sitting in her wheel-chair, calmly listening to our conversation, said, "Will you begin to build your spire from the top?"* It was a strange question, but she evidently meant something, and looked for an answer. I gave it, saying, ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... missionaries to a right of travel and residence 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 ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... LEGEND. Prologue: The Spire of Strasburg Cathedral I. The Castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine Courtyard of the Castle II. A Farm in the Odenwald A Room in the Farmhouse Elsie's Chamber The Chamber of Gottlieb and Ursula A Village Church A Room in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Cathedral square,—all ready for marching orders. No interference was offered either from soldiery or police; and the people came pouring up from every quarter of the city in their thousands and tens of thousands. By noon, the tall lace-like spire of the Cathedral towered above a vast sea of human heads, which from a distance looked like swarming bees; and as the bells struck the hour, Thord, mounting the steps of a monument erected to certain heroes who had long ago fallen in battle, was greeted with a roar of acclamation like the thunder ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... just distinguish our church spire amid the whirling snow; and then a panic seized me. I must get down at some spot where I would not be recognized, for oh, I did not want any one to tell that old stage-driver who I was, and thus bring discredit upon my father, the ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... constant features are the pines and cedars. Summer and winter alike these stand unchanged, types of constancy and vigor. Yet, though there is no change, one who loves them both can at a time of year see a certain variation. This comes with the spire-like cedars, that stand so erect and point ever heavenward in close-drawn robes of priestly solemnity, in early May. Then for a few brief days the glow of spring sunshine gets into their blood and ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Redeem'd from tapers and defrauded pies, Inspir'd he seizes: these an altar raise; An hecatomb of pure, unsully'd lays That altar crowns; a folio common-place Founds the whole pile, of all his works the base: Quartos, Octavos, shape the less'ning pyre, A twisted birth-day ode completes the spire. "Then he, great tamer of all human art! First in my care, and ever at my heart; Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend, With whom my Muse began, with whom shall end, Ere since Sir Fopling's periwig ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... broad as the actual current. They flow, these historic waters, with a pleasant sound, overborne at moments by the clapping noise of Cosenza's washerwomen, who cleanse their linen by beating it, then leave it to dry on the river-bed. Along the banks stood tall poplars, each a spire of burnished gold, blazing against the dark olive foliage on the slopes behind them; plane trees, also, very rich of colour, and fig trees shedding their latest leaves. Now, tradition has it that Alaric ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... the 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 the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... From spire and barn looked westerly the patient weathercocks; But even the birches on the hill stood motionless as rocks. No sound was in the woodlands save the squirrel's dropping shell, And the yellow leaves among the boughs, low ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... the Lamb of God. 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. Do you know Kate *********. I am stuffed out so with eating turkey for dinner, and another ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... one knows, set on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list, would answer: 'There I was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... gorgeously stained, Crimson and purple, green and blue, and dun, And all their wedded colors fall below, Like rainbows shattered on a field of snow; A bordering gallery runs along the roof, Topt by a cupola, whose glittering spire Pierces the brooding clouds, a glowing woof, With golden spindles wove in Morning's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... come right along up," the landlady called down through the oval spire formed by the ascending hand-rail ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... from living lips in this country, which is full of his influence, where the spire of his monastery marks every village, and where every man has at one time or another been his monk, is quite a different thing to reading of him in far countries, under other skies and swayed by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden in the dusk, in just such ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... fair and fresh. As tall as ever, moreover, and as lean 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 hard for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... they passed until at length they came to Bramshaw, a little village standing partly in Hampshire and partly in Wiltshire and forming the forest boundary. Before them swelled the rounded forms of the Wiltshire downs, and from their midst towered the spire of Salisbury with the mound of old ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... thus 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, which can be scaled by us. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... at the "White 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 a friend, comes to join her people in dedicating the church to Christian ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... all the pilgrim ground a century later (867). Fidelis, sailing up the Nile, was astonished at the sight of the "Seven Barns of Joseph, (the Pyramids) looking like mountains, but all of stone, square at the base, rounded in the upper part and twisted at the summit like a spire. On measuring a side of one of them, it was found to be four hundred feet." From the Nile Fidelis sailed by the freshwater canal of Necho, Hadrian, and Amrou, not finally blocked up till 767, direct to the Red Sea, "near where Moses crossed with the Israelites." ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... eyes towards the city, Burr experienced a thrill of surprise. The prospect surpassed his pre-conceptions. In the subdued glow of the setting sun, he saw all things touched with a visionary splendour. Streets, roofs, belfries, the cathedral spire, and the flag of the Union streaming far away above the fort, appeared objects in an enchanted scene. Were the seven cities of Cibola clustered ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... 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 ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... old, 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 avenue leading Whither ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... strife. The sturdy king had drawn his sword, not dull of edge, heirloom old; and each of the two felt fear of his foe, though fierce their mood. Stoutly stood with his shield high-raised the warrior king, as the worm now coiled together amain: the mailed-one waited. Now, spire by spire, fast sped and glided that blazing serpent. The shield protected, soul and body a shorter while for the hero-king than his heart desired, could his will have wielded the welcome respite but once in his life! But Wyrd denied it, and victory's honors. — His arm he lifted lord of the Geats, ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... silk holaku, trimmed with 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 language ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... alley with the cosey tobacconist's shop which he used to frequent. Gone the hospitable Stackpole where many a time at the "latter end of a sea-coal fire" he heard the bell strike midnight from the spire of the Old South Church! But, though "the spot where many times he triumphed is forgot"—his calm and gentle genius and his hale physique have endured in unabated vigor, so that he has charmed two generations ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... this unpleasant experience the mad fellow "took off" down wind. This idiotic method of leaving the ground resulted in his being barely able to rise above the roofs of the near-by village and brought him into direct contact with the church spire. The spire being of solid construction withstood the impact; the aeroplane did not. So Killem and his companions, together with the wrecked Handley-Page and one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight pounds of undetonated bombs descended onto the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... market-place, and in the principal streets they will be seen rushing about as if 'on change,' or hurrying to 'catch the train for Paris,' like the rest of the world. A few only have eyes of love and admiration for the noble spire of the church of St. Pierre, which rises above the old houses and the market-place, with even a grander effect than any that the artist has been able to render in the illustration. 'St. Pierre, St. Pierre,' are the first and last words we heard of Caen; the first time, when—approaching ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... many Hindu temples in Bombay, though not many of them are accessible to strangers; but the party drove to one in the Black Town. It had a low dome and a pyramidal spire. Both of them were of the Indian style of architecture, very elaborate in ornamentation. It looked like a huge mass of ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... 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 a day would he have yarkt ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... his neck. "I dreamt," she said, "that you and I, Uncle St. Bernard, were walking in a great big city, and there was a church with a golden spire. There were a lot of steps up to it—and Scooter—" a sob rose in her throat and was swiftly suppressed—"was sunning himself on the top. And I tried to run up the steps and catch him, but there were always more and more and more steps, and I couldn't get any nearer. And I cried at last, I was ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... sights of the day was an Alpini perched on his spire of the Tooth, who kept the Austrian machine gunners from their task, pelting them with rocks every time ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... refuge in its steeple, whither they were quickly followed. Only by dejected appeals and a promise not to injure Gustavus Vasa did they succeed in escaping from the tower, and the Dalmen, thinking that some of them might remain concealed in the narrow spire, shot their arrows at it from every side. For more than a hundred years after some of these arrows remained sticking in the old ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... houses 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 ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... 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 the property of ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... wildness and horror of its appearance, seeming to be entirely composed of inaccessible rocks, without the smallest apparent admixture of earth or mould, upon or between them. These rocks terminate in a vast number of rugged points, which spire up to a prodigious height, and are all covered with everlasting snow; their pointed summits or pinnacles being every way surrounded by frightful precipices, and often overhanging in a most astonishing manner. The hills which are crowned by the rugged rocks, are generally separated from each ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... grave during the storm, and the heavy mound of sand lies upon it to this day. The drifting sand had covered the vaulted roof of the church, the arched cloisters, and the stone aisles. The white thorn and the dog rose now blossom above the place where the church lies buried, but the spire, like an enormous monument over a grave, can be seen for miles round. No king has a more splendid memorial. Nothing disturbs the peaceful sleep of the dead. I was the first to hear this story, for the storm sung it to me ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... 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 ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... returning in long flights to their favourite haunts, from which we had disturbed them. We saw four kangaroos; and shot some bronze-winged pigeons; in the crop of one I found a small Helix with a long spire,—a form I do not remember ever having seen before in the colony. A considerable number of small brown snakes were living in the water-hole; they were generally seen in the shallow water with their heads ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... 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 seemed to come ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... 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
... English fashion; the walk wound, serpent-like, among a profusion of evergreens irregularly planted; the scene was shut in and bounded, except where at a distance, through an opening of the trees, you caught the spire of a distant church, over which glimmered, faint and fair, the smile ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it. The traveller is in the position of that famous fantastic who tied his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city. But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire; but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome,— where the priests have put a cross on ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... else was strange: my childhood knew them. I had seen that golden sign with the dark globe in its curve leaning back on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old field, in Old England, in long past days, just as it now leaned back beside a stately spire in this continental capital. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... 'tis like to split his throat. Why, 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
... noteworthy features. Taking its area to be about 8000 square miles, at least 1200 square miles of it is occupied by the central mountain group and its adjuncts, the highest peak rising to a height of nearly 5000 feet (or nearly 600 feet higher than Ben Nevis), above the interior, and throwing a fine spire of shadow thereon. In the midst of this central boss are two deep craters, one being about 10 miles in diameter, and a number of shallower depressions. In association with the loftiest peak, I noted at 8 h., March 9, 1889, two brilliant little ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... temple for Catholic worship, erected at Pointe a Puizeau about 1854, is very picturesquely located; its stained glass windows, its graceful new spire, frescoed ceilings, add much to its beauty. The Rev'd Messire George Drolet has succeeded to the Rev. Father Harkin, who had been in charge ever since the late Abbe Ferland was appointed secretary to the Archbishop of Quebec and Military Chaplain to the Forces. For some time in 1877, St. Columba ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... away there is a thin line of faintly blue hills. Nearer to view there are grey heights more sharply outlined and rough, like drawing paper—painted with a green wood, a red-roofed farm, a black church spire, and a brown ploughed field. Immediately below them a green hedge hanging over a running stream that has caught the blue of the sky. Above them vast swollen clouds flooding slowly with the faint yellow of the coming sunset, hanging stationary above the stream ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... that straight 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 is the Lord our God, And let His ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it, you are advancing into the most perfect of landlocked harbours. A great cliff rises on the left,—Quirpon Point they call it,—and clinging to its base like an overgrown limpet is a tiny cottage, with its inevitable fish stage. Farther along are more houses; then a white church with a pointed spire, and a bright-green building near by, while across the path is a very pretty square green school. Next are the Mission buildings in a group. Beyond them come more small houses—"Little Labrador" I learned ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... the reaches, now dazzling, now sombre, now slipping secret under woods, and now silverly open to the gentle slopes of the park, brought wildness and romance into a scene that had else been tame. Beyond the river on a rising ground was a village church with a spire. The formal garden, the Georgian conservatory, the park, the river, the church—they breathed England and the traditional English life. All that they implied, of custom and inheritance, of strength and narrowness, of cramping prejudice ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... possession of the young ladies. They were riding between walled courts, substantially built, with intervals of fields and woods, or sometimes indeed of morass; for London was still an island in the middle of swamps, with the great causeways of the old Roman times leading to it. The spire of St. Paul's and the square keep of the Tower had been pointed out to them, and ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proceeded up the Valley there were pointed out to us the Three Brothers, a triple group of rocks, three thousand eight hundred feet high. Cathedral Spire, Sentinel Rock, Yosemite and Lost Arrow Falls, and all the other points of interest that can be seen on entering ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... Green-black, and splotched with snow that clung here and there upon their branches, along the southward limits of the barren crowded down the serried ranks of the ancient fir forest. Endlessly baffled, but endlessly unconquered, the hosts of the firs thrust out their grim spire-topped vanguards, at intervals, into the hostile vacancy of the barren. Between these dark vanguards, long, silent aisles of whiteness led back and gently upward into ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the Close of Wrychester. Nowhere else in England is there a fairer prospect of old-world peace. There before their eyes, set in the centre of a great green sward, fringed by tall elms and giant beeches, rises the vast fabric of the thirteenth-century Cathedral, its high spire piercing the skies in which rooks are for ever circling and calling. The time-worn stone, at a little distance delicate as lacework, is transformed at different hours of the day into shifting shades of colour, varying from grey to purple: the massiveness of the great nave and transepts contrasts ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... 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, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... loma^, pena [U.S.], picacho^, tump^; knoll, hummock, hillock, barrow, mound, mole; steeps, bluff, cliff, craig^, tor^, peak, pike, clough^; escarpment, edge, ledge, brae; dizzy height. tower, pillar, column, obelisk, monument, steeple, spire, minaret, campanile, turret, dome, cupola; skyscraper. pole, pikestaff, maypole, flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... corn-fields and lawny pasture land; farmhouses embowered in orchards and hamlets shaded by the straggling members of some vast and ancient forest. Then rose in the distance the dim blue towers, or the graceful spire, of some old cathedral, and soon the spreading causeways announced their approach to some provincial capital. The coachman flanks his leaders, who break into a gallop; the guard sounds his triumphant bugle; the coach bounds over the noble bridge ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... anxious eye, No bark or ax-blow could he hear, No human trace descry. His sinuous path, by blazes, wound Among trunks grouped in myriads round; Through naked boughs, between Whose tangled architecture fraught With many a shape grotesquely wrought, The hemlock's spire was seen.—A. ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... Easter Sunday 1716 during service some pieces of stone from the spire of St. Mary's fell on the roof of the church. The congregation, thinking that the steeple was coming down, in their alarm broke through the windows. Johnson, we may well believe, witnessed the scene. The church was pulled down, and the new one was opened in Dec. 1721. Harwood's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... summits rear Still as its spire, and yonder flock At rest in those calm fields appear As chiselled from ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... a day's journey, but a moment later he discovered his mistake. It was suddenly borne in upon him that the tall, thin object which nestled so closely among the trees a mile to the south that it was scarcely distinguishable from them, was in reality the spire of some church; and he knew that he was much closer to his kind ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... on 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, and by that nonchalant culture of the soil ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... hunted for many ages. The day of their dominion was past. There was a spell over the dark warrior. The Great Spirit had sealed his doom. He had sent strange men to his shores—and a change had come over the face of the land. The thickly settled town—the lofty spire of the house where men assembled to worship the Great Being—the fields, green, and glowing with the deep verdure of spring—the slopes of the hills, made smooth with cultivation—had taken the place of the lofty forest, from which arose the cry of the red warrior, as he rushed on his foes, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and stars.—COLERIDGE: ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... road from 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
... and stunn'd I lay; till casting round My half unconscious gaze, I saw the foe Borne on a car of roses to the ground, By volant angels; and as sailing slow He sunk the hoary battlement below, While on the tall spire slept the slant sunbeam, Sweet on the enamour'd zephyr was the flow Of heavenly instruments. Such strains oft seem, On star-light hill, to soothe ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the weeping-elm, and the alder, glittered in the sunlight,—their finny inhabitants occasionally leaping in the air, in joyous sport. Fourteen buildings were scattered over the demesne,—one, by its spire, seeming to be devoted to purposes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... inclement during my absence that I felt quite secure concerning all intrusion for her. At noon the storm rose high, with a close-timed thunder and lightning; the Episcopal church spire was struck; two trees were blown over in the square; and, instead of ordering Dan and the horses out in this tumult, I dined with a board member living next the library, and drove home at three o'clock when the violence ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... wind took by the tail St. Peter's cock on the church spire and whirled it about, so did the wind of words in Glaston rudely seize and flack hither and thither the spiritual reputation of Thomas Wingfold, curate. And all the time, the young man was wrestling, his life in his hand, with his own unbelief; while upon his horizon ever and anon rose the glimmer ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... travelled onward, the ruined city began to grow upon him in ever heavier and darker mass. Here and there a half-demolished church-spire raised itself above the neighboring roof-line; plainly this had been one of the old-time residential sections and of the better class. Still farther down the stream and the water-front stood crowded thickly with wharves ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the heart of the largest cities. Fortunately, there is no doubt at all on this point. They stood in pairs at the doors of the great temples, one on each side, where they served the same purpose which the campanile of the Italian church or the spire of a cathedral serves at the present day. Indeed, architects are of opinion that church towers and steeples are mere survivals of the old Egyptian obelisks, which furnished the original conception. The tower corresponded to the shaft of the obelisk, and the steeple to the sharp ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... just across the Square. Its tall brown stone spire and arched doorways attracted Elizabeth when she first came to the place. Now she entered ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... Her bright corolla glows. When leaves hang pendant on their withered stalks, Through all the half-deserted garden walks; And through long autumn nights, The merry dancers scale the northern heights, And tiny crystal points of frost-white fire Make brightly scintillant each blade and spire, Still under shade of shelt'ring wall, Or under winter's shroud of snows, Undimmed, the faithful pansy blows, The ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... 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. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... 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 had produced no change. Retaining these ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... are the Canadian pine, white cypress, 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
... the sun was touching St. Mary's spire into flame when the heavy-eyed porter heard a key turn in the wicket. It was the Senior Fellow, and in about half an hour he appeared again at the lodge, carrying a small bag, and handed the porter a letter addressed to the President of the College. He then stepped out into the ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... far the most brilliant spectacle I ever saw. All was dark and silent till, at the first stroke of the bell, light flashed from a hundred thousand burners, and the entire front of the Church and Dome, up to the very summit of the spire, was one magnificent galaxy, while the double row of gigantic pillars or columns surrounding the square was in like manner radiant with jets of flame. I thought the architecture of St. Peter's Rome's ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... (Vol. ii., p. 494.), which is referred to by your correspondent, is the first instance, I believe, of the application of a new material to the construction of an ecclesiastical edifice. It is built throughout, walls, tower, and spire, benches and fittings, of terra cotta from the Ladyshore works. The architect is that accomplished antiquary, Mr. Sharpe of Lancaster, who furnished the designs of every part, from which moulds were made, and in these the composition forming the terra cotta was prepared, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... meadows you see from your windows," said Lord Engleton. "That village is Masham, with the spire shewing through the trees. I daresay you ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the hill, he saw in the valley below the church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that millionaires must experience when they come back ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... most of the other churches of the realm. Its central tower, though then in an incomplete state, was much finer than it now is, as it had a handsome octagon above what now forms the central tower. The north western transept tower was also adorned with a lofty spire. This spire, which was of wood covered with lead, was taken down soon after ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... we wandered, and how strove To build with fire-tried vows the piteous home Which memory haunts and whither sleep may roam,— They only know for whom the roof of Love Is the still-seated secret of the grove, Nor spire may rise ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... pretty a little room as any child could have wished for—bright and neat and comfortable, with a pleasant look-out on the lawn at the side of the house, while farther off, over the trees, the village church, or rather its high spire, could be seen. For a moment Beata forgot ...
— Rosy • Mrs. Molesworth
... in a cup-like depression, lay a nearly circular lake of the purest and stillest water, in whose mirror-like surface were reflected the rocky sides, verdant with beautiful growth, the towering trees and spire-like needles which ran up for hundreds of feet, here and there crumbled into every imaginable form, but clothed by nature with wondrous growth wherever plant could find room to root in ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... 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, to see where it might stop, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... work to be done when a ship gets under way. Some of them, their tasks accomplished for the moment, were standing on the forecastle, or peering through the gun ports, gazing at the city, with the tall spire of Christ Church and the more substantial elevation of the building even then beginning to be known as Independence Hall, rising in the background beyond the shipping and over the other buildings which they were so rapidly ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... for the gore of serfs and of their Czar. The half barbaric Moscow's minarets Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets! 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain—he saw thee—how? with spire And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match, To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch, To this the merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall—and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... 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 way ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the funeral monument (for we can scarcely doubt that this is the origin of the stupa)[409] has already assumed the conventional form known as Dagoba, consisting of a dome and chest of relics, with a spire at the top, the whole surrounded by railings or a colonnade, but though the carving is lavish, no figure of the Buddha himself is to be seen. He is represented by a symbol such as a footprint, wheel, or tree. But in the later school of sculpture ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... "A spire of grass hath made me gay; It saith I shall find mercy mild. I measured in the self-same way I have seen practised by a child." "Come look and listen if she really does: She does, does not, she does, does not, she does. Each time I try, the end so augureth. That comforts me,—'tis right that ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... tailor's shop in which he was apprenticed to come back knighted for his victory over the Spaniards at Vigo Bay. Ventnor, known as the "metropolis of the Undercliff," is beyond Bonchurch, and is also a thriving wateringplace, above which rises the attractive spire of Holy Trinity Church, built by the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... sneering, self-satisfied, contemptuous, inhuman, like some cynical, debased speculator making a sure profit out of the innocent weaknesses of human nature. As she turned and looked she could see the whole ugly town with the spire of St. John's-Paul's church, raised ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... it, Left behind it the walls of the town and the fresh-whitened towers. Thus drove Hermann on till he came to the well-known causeway. Rapidly, loitering nowhere, but hastening up hill and down hill. But as he now before him perceived the spire of the village, And no longer remote the garden-girt houses were lying, Then in himself he thought that here he ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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 ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... piteously lost, strangled in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt. In the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this is the Menin Road. How it haunted the war news for months and years, like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west a ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wanted to go to the top of the spire, in spite of her high heels, and long dress which swept the stairs or was caught in a corner of the staircase; she did not worry about it, but pulled the stuff which split, and went on climbing, holding it up. She wanted very much to ring the bells. From the top of the tower ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... can gratefully own that there are indeed these high mysteries of friendship, and I can be glad to discern them afar off, as the dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-swept farm, can see, far away in the woodland valley, the smoke go up from happy cottage-chimneys, nestled in leaves, and the spire point a hopeful finger up to heaven. Life would be a poorer thing if we had all that we desired, and it is permitted to hope that if we are faithful with our few things, we may be ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Scotchman, a man of education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... notice? He hastily climbed the hill and turned across the dark-green fields, following the black cinder-track. In the distance, across a shallow dip in the country, the small town was clustered like smouldering ash, a tower, a spire, a heap of low, raw, extinct houses. And on the nearest fringe of the town, sloping into the dip, was Oldmeadow, the Pervins' house. He could see the stables and the outbuildings distinctly, as they lay towards him on the slope. Well, he would not go there many ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... need not be avoided on account of its unsavouriness. No sooner are you beyond the dingy streets than all is beauty, pastoralness and romance. Every green peak is crested with ruined keep or tower, at the foot of the meeting hills lie peaceful little villages, each with its lofty church spire, whilst all the air is fragrant with pine-woods and newly ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... old station that Tita knows so well. She looks out of the window, her heart in her eyes, taking in all the old signs—the guard fussy as ever—Evans the porter (she nods to him through eyes filled with tears)—the glimpse of the church spire over the top of the station-house—the little damp patch in the roof ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... 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
... said Dr. Winstock, as the Josephine rounded a bend in the river. "You can see the spire ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... had spoke, when, fair and soft, The roof began to mount aloft; Aloft rose every beam and rafter; The heavy wall climbed slowly after. The chimney widened 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; Doomed ever in suspense to dwell, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... 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 ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... whose blunt gray spire protruded through the young green elms, lay in a little valley through which a stream rushed to the sea. The lane was not very steep, but there were loose stones. Bruno stumbled, he was down; the carriage stood still, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tall grasses fringing the banks, or circled about the lily-pads growing in the eddies. In the middle of the meadow, just where two white ribbons of roads crossed, was a clump of trees pierced by a church-spire. Outside of this bower of green—a darker green than the velvet meadow- grass about it—glistened the roofs and windows of the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hide, thank you. How exquisitely the mist is curling up, and showing the church-spire in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were 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; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... fallen upon Paris affected all classes alike. Every feeling of pity seemed to have been blotted out. Natural affection disappeared. A man's foes were those of his own household. On the plea of religious zeal the most barbarous acts were committed. Spire Niquet, a poor bookbinder, whose scanty earnings barely sufficed to support the wants of his seven children, was half-roasted in a bonfire made of his own books, and then dragged to the river and drowned.[1018] ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... eyes, 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, to be no workmen upon ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... like a glass on the point of breaking, unless you are idiots, acknowledge that you said 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: ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... by its shrivelled and lean body that never will make right good Malt; or if it is mown at a proper time, and if it be housed damp, or wettish, it will be apt to heat and mow-burn, and then it will never make so good Malt, because it will not spire, nor come so regularly on the floor as that which ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... or disregards it, which ever may be most advantageous. During several days the tendrils, or internodes, or both, spontaneously revolve with a steady motion. The tendril strikes some object, and quickly curls round and firmly grasps it. In the course of some hours it contracts into a spire, dragging up the stem, and forming an excellent spring. All movements now cease. By growth the tissues soon become wonderfully strong and durable. The tendril has done its work, and has done it in ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... more liturgical question, and, in addition, a proposition boldly practical in the Kyrie, the spire of your Cathedral. The inspiration and structure of it are certainly admirable..."omnia excelsa tua et fluctus tui super me transierunt." Nevertheless, during these 300 bars, about, of a slow and almost continuous ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... 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 ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... was almost as bright as day, and the mystic rays from the realm of Luna, shining on gate, arch, column, spire, tower, temple and dome, revealed to us the ghosts of vanished centuries, and from the depths of the Coliseum there seemed to rise the shouts of a hundred thousand voices, cheering the gladiator from Gaul, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee shot past him so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell, quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Lippershey 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 and ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... and rode along the ridge whence the West became visible, and a washed edge of red over Beckley Church spire and the woods of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... on the hill's slopes, among the trees, stood the square white houses of the town folk. Beyond them, the white spire of the church with its weather vane atop. Joel marked that the wind was still northeast. The vane swung fitfully in the light air. He could see the masts and yards of the ships along the waterfront. The yards of the Nathan Ross were canted in mournful tribute to his brother. At ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... afforded by their several languages, have got at the English "genteel." Consider, a little, all the meanness that there is in that epithet, and then see, when next you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais spire will look. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Woodbourne, who, placing some benches in the aisle for the temporary accommodation of his new parishioners, made every effort to raise funds to build and endow an additional church. He succeeded, as we have heard; and it was the tall white spire of the now Church of St. Austin's, which greeted Anne Merton's delighted eyes, as on the 27th of August, she, with her father and mother, came to the top of a long hill, about five miles from Abbeychurch. What that sight was to her, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... most interesting point in all Brussels is the Hotel de Ville. That marvellous edifice, that looks as though it ought to be preserved in a velvet-lined case, so delicate and elaborate are its multitudinous sculptures, lifts the exquisite tracery of its spire against the summer sky, as perfect in its beauty as when Alva and Egmont and Orange passed beneath its shadow ages ago. No spot in Europe, save perhaps the Tower of London, is more haunted by historic memories than is this perfect marvel of architectural beauty. The centuries roll ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Washington destroyed all of his letters. There is only one of them to be found which was written after their marriage. It is in an old book, printed in New York in 1796, when the narrow streets around the tall spire of Trinity were the centre of social life, and the busy hum of Wall Street was not to be heard ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Above the sea-mist float, The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth; And Peter's fortress-spire, A slender lance of fire, Still sparkles back the splendor of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... week, two men appeared upon the wide, 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 van of green ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... grand. Pointed arches, clustered columns, vaulted roof, spire buttress. Forms both ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... booke, like mouthe, unopened is dumbe. And there be some, perchance, will bidde you off To Conventre, or Yorke, or Jericho; But be not you, my booke, abashed by scoff, For I will teach you where you boun to go,— Which is in Gloucestershire, there unto Bisley, Where the church spire is spied long afarre; It is not either uncouth, square, or grisly, But soareth high, as if to catch a starre; Where shall the brother of the Christian Yeare, Keble, hereafter tend the seven springs, Above whose fountains doth The Grove uproar, Like to Mount Helicon, where Clio sings, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... annihilated; walls are lost in windows; aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless soaring lines—lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent growth—converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The campanile, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of the vast distance of the pillars from whence they turn the cupula, on which, they say, is a spire to be erected three hundred feet in height, whose towering pinnacle will stand with such stupendous loftiness above Bow Steeple dragon or the Monument's flaming urn, that it will appear to the rest of the Holy Temples like a cedar of Lebanon, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... down to Wall Street, Uncle," he continued, "and go into Trinity Church. There's a magnificent view from the spire." ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... striated species, with an acute elevated spire. We have named it after Mr. T. Phillips, who has assiduously collected many new ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal water,—their necessity to the completion of a landscape. I recollect well having the value of a stern straight line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had become ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... them up. He had his well eye on Sam, and crushed his head like an eggshell, with one bite! Then he made a sweep with his paw, and knocked Jack Habersham clean out the tent. He must have gone a hundred feet through the air, for he come down on top of the steeple, and is there yet with the spire sticking up through him. Then he hit Bill Dunham such a clip that he sailed out through the same hole in the tent that Jack passed through. When I left, Bill hadn't been seed by anybody. Guess he hasn't ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... 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 glow of ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... persons closed their doors, and said that Christmas would be cold. In a quarter of an hour they saw their chronology late by a day. In half an hour they noted a gray mist drive across the sky. There was a faint wavering and spreading and deflection at the top of the tallest spire of smoke. Somewhere, high above, there passed a ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the shattered window at the gray spire of the cathedral. "There's your launching site. We don't know how they got up there, ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Pies! I 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... near 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 Cape Deseada and Cape ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... very cold, the natives contrive to erect their houses in a very ingenious manner to defend themselves from the severity of the weather. Surrounding them by a deep trench, they raise great pieces of timber on its outer edge, which close all in a point at the top, like the spire of a steeple. Their fire is in the middle of this conical hut, and they sleep on the ground strewed with rushes, around the fire. The men go naked, but the women wear a kind of petticoat of bull-rushes, dressed in the manner of hemp, which is fastened round ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 to the left. My landlady told me it ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... period, probably by John de Berwick, who was dean from 1286-1312, a spire was added to the central tower. This was for long in an unsafe condition, and at length, in 1600, it fell. The following is the description given by Coker, a contemporary writer: "Having discoursed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... about 5 acres inclosed by the steep and rocky and lofty clifts of the river and that so closely had they kept themselves and horses within this little spot that there was not a track to be seen of them within a quarter of a mile of that place. every spire of grass was eaten up by their horses near their camp which had the appearance of their having remained here some time. his horse being much fatiegued with the ride he had given him and finding that the indians had at least 2 days ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... child from its earliest reminiscence up to old age: it is written upon every tangible and permanent object within the habitual cognizance of the eye—upon stone, and tree, and rivulet—upon the green hill, and the verdant plain, and the opulent valley—upon house, and garden, and steeple-spire—upon the soil, whether it be rough or smooth, sandy or ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... week out, the human writing-machines, and those other machines which are almost human (and better than human in some points) hurry through their allotted tasks, and ignore the saintly shadow cast upon them by the spire of St. Dunstan. This is indeed the centre of the world: the hub from whence spring the spokes of the vast wheel of life. For to this point all things over the world converge by a vast web of wire, railroad, coach road, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... left there was a gleam of green, 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
... that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list, would answer: 'There ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... 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
... 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 came down ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... with trees, peaks bare and rugged, and glens with sparkling torrents dashing and foaming 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 ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... must be upright, hard, or else burning, either conical, or clubbed at one end. Thus—the torch, flame of fire, cone, serpent, thyrsus, triangle, letter T, cross, crosier, sceptre, caduceus, knobbed stick, tall tree, upright stone, spire, tower, minaret, upright pole, arrow, spear, sword, club, upright stump, etc., are all symbols of the generative force of the male energy in Nature ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... I went for a walk to a village lately shelled by German heavy guns. Their effect was awful—ghastly. It was impossible to imagine the amount of damage done until one really saw it. The church was terrible too. The spire was sticking upside down in the ground a short distance from the door. The church itself was a mass of debris. Scarcely anything was left unhit. In the churchyard again the destruction was terrific—tombstones ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that, if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof of the old gray church, and crush it all ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a magnificent sight, those twelve chilly glasses entering the room on a waiter, the red and white custard rising from each glass like a church-steeple, and the spoon-handle shooting up from the apex like a spire. I doubt if a person of the nicest palate could have distinguished, with his eyes shut, which was the vanilla and which the strawberry; but if I could at this moment obtain a cream tasting as that did, I would give five dollars for a very ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of the most delightful afternoons I have ever spent," Douglas remarked. "What a beautiful place you have here, with the river right near, and the spire of the church showing above the tree tops. I wish I were an artist. By the way, I was around the church this morning, and everything shows signs of neglect. It struck me as ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing—ah, so plaintively and sweetly!—of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"—i.e. went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... on hills our childhood wist, Woods, hamlets, streams, beholding! The sun strikes, through the furthest mist, The city's spire to golden. The city's golden spire it was, When hope and health were strongest, But now it is the churchyard grass We look upon the longest. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... stands in graceful strength; Its spire points upward to the sky; And nestled in its sheltering arms The birds of heaven ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... pen be scann'd. Thou see'st the saints and 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 way to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... down among legions of 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
... Thompson, "or I'd offer to show you the way. But you can't miss it. You can see the spire from the window. It's the finest specimen of early Gothic in the north of France. The glass is superb. There's an altar piece by Raphael or Botticelli, I forget which. The screen is late Italian Renaissance, and there's a tomb ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... in the breeze that blew fitfully from the west. Fuselli was waiting. He took out his watch now and then and strained his eyes to see the time, but there was not light enough. At last the deep broken note of the bell in the church spire struck once. It must be ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... the distance, and the glint of a wide stream not very far off, 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, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind, A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind, Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, Of merriest days, of love and Islington, Kindling anew the flames of past desire; And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, To the green ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... begin walking leisurely round the enclosed garden, and looking outward from the eminence upon which the castle was built across the moat at the foot, and away over the sunny forest towards the village and little church, whose spire rose ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the morning the sun gets up From behind the village spire; And the children dream that the first red gleam Is the ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... 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 rock, a little fire, from ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... communication with it by a septum. The number of chambers is irregular, and they are generally wanting in the innermost whorl. The animal of the recent Turritella communis partitions off in like manner as it advances in age a part of its spire, forming a shelly septum. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... anguish-struck, like men Who have seen the roaring torrent Sweep their happy homes away, And yet linger by the margin, Staring idly on the spray. But, without, the maddening tumult Waxes ever more and more, And the crowd of wailing women Gather round the Council door. Every dusky spire is ringing With a dull and hollow knell, And the Miserere's singing To the tolling of the bell. Through the streets the burghers hurry, Spreading terror as they go; And the rampart's thronged with watchers For the coming of the foe. From each mountain-top a pillar Streams ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... excluded any glimpse of the Bishop's garden, and beyond loomed the Cathedral, with two grey pigeons circling about its spire. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... wide place Where love is frozen in marble, spire on spire, A snow-white nightingale with a heart of fire Soaring in space. We gaze, together, into the shining pool To catch the soul of beauty unaware Finding only the peaceful body there Of beauty drowned and still ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... in Nassau Street. While the British held New York the bell was taken down and secreted. When the Middle Dutch Church became the Post Office in 1845 the bell was removed, first to the Ninth Street Church, then to the Lafayette Place Church, and later to its present location. The crocketed spire of the Church of St. Nicholas is two hundred and seventy feet high. Within the edifice is a tablet to the soldiers and sailors of the Revolution, placed by the Daughters of the Revolution, and oil portraits of all the ministers of the church ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 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 ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... face or scene; and the kind fingers which did the pasting-in; and the care with which we made portrait and landscape fit into and illustrate one another. And what memories, what impressions, strong and clear as yesterday's, clung to each succeeding view! The Spire—that "pinnacle perched on a precipice"—with its embosoming trees, as one had so often seen it from the North-Western Railway, while the finger of fate, protruding from the carriage window, pointed it out with—"That's where you will go to school." ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... 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 ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... to me 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 that think. We must look to ourselves ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the sun on battlement and tower, and in the blue air overhead a Hock of clattering jackdaws flew around the gilded weather vane and spire. Then, in the brightness of the morning, the drawbridge fell across the moat with a rattle and clank of chains, the gate of the castle swung slowly open, and a goodly array of steel-clad men-at-arms, with a knight all clothed in chain mail, as white as frost on brier and ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... 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 ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... 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, Mr. Brown thinks ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... transcendent! Yet what impenetrable mystery too, what menacing ruin to the small remnant of human life still spared from the generations in ages past, already swallowed up! Peering around in this pensive mood, in which the joy of being mixed with the uneasy doubt of its tenure, my eye fell at last on the spire of a little church, rising like a pencil of light to heaven, out of the fathomless waste. And there my soul alighted and found rest. Like some sea mark to the voyager, that slender shaft, reared by the social religion of the world, stood to tell me where in the universe ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... terrified Danes now fled to the church and took refuge in its steeple, whither they were quickly followed. Only by dejected appeals and a promise not to injure Gustavus Vasa did they succeed in escaping from the tower, and the Dalmen, thinking that some of them might remain concealed in the narrow spire, shot their arrows at it from every side. For more than a hundred years after some of these arrows remained sticking in ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... spray, While the whole camp with little Nell, on English meadows, Wandered and lost their way. Lost is that camp and wasted all its fire, And he who wro't that spell; Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye have one tale to tell. Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story Blend with the breath that thrills With hop vines' incense all the pensive glory That fills the Kentish hills. And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreath entwine, ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... same season. It was early; so early that the cross of Grace Church had, when I looked up, just caught the morning sun, and for a moment flamed like a crusader's symbol. And then the grace and glory of that exquisite spire became slowly visible. Fret by fret the sunlight stole slowly down, quivering and dropping from each, until at last the whole church beamed in rosy radiance. Up and down the long avenue the street lay in shadow; by some strange trick of the atmosphere ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... already made the open earth with its corn and grass more dear to him and wonderful. But 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 slowly ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the departing sun was on his face. The music of the birds was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him. Thatched roofs of poor men's homes were in the distance; and an old grey spire, surmounted by a Cross, rose up between him and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... hoar summit, mildly bright [Footnote 16] With purple ether's liquid light, High o'er the world, the white-rob'd Magi gaze On dazzling bursts of heavenly fire; Start at each blue, portentous blaze, Each flame that flits with adverse spire. But say, what sounds my ear invade [Footnote 17] From Delphi's venerable shade? The temple rocks, the laurel waves! "The God! the God!" the Sybil cries. Her figure swells! she foams, she raves! Her figure swells to more than mortal size! Streams of ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... advancing into the most perfect of landlocked harbours. A great cliff rises on the left,—Quirpon Point they call it,—and clinging to its base like an overgrown limpet is a tiny cottage, with its inevitable fish stage. Farther along are more houses; then a white church with a pointed spire, and a bright-green building near by, while across the path is a very pretty square green school. Next are the Mission buildings in a group. Beyond them come more small houses—"Little Labrador" I learned later that this group is called, because the people living there have almost all come over ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... his immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning. It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of common-sense descended ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the blasted tree sliced by shell-fire, the upturned railway—truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-line, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In "quiet" sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual shell-fire or snipers' bullets, and that became part of the boredom. "What casualties?" ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... they came to St. Paul's and turned the corner to the gate. It was dark below, but some frenzied fools were burning tar-barrels far down Ann Street, and the light flickered on the top of the church spire. They crossed the churchyard to where a shallow grave had been dug, half way down the hill. The men lowered the body into it; the old negro gave them a little rouleau of coin, and they went hurriedly ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... next corner north of the Claxton place was a large church, with a tall spire, and an adjoining parish house. They were built of the same cream-colored stone, which had grown sallow under the smoke, with chocolate-brown trimmings, like a deep edging to a mourning handkerchief. Its appearance pleased Milly. She felt sure that the best ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 maiden ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... centre of the old town is placed a square of considerable size, surrounded by high antiquated buildings of a most remarkable construction; and the Hotel de Ville, which occupies nearly one of its sides, is ornamented by a high Gothic spire of the lightest form, and the most exquisite proportions. The Cathedral is large, and has two massy towers in front; but the effect of the interior, which would otherwise be very grand, from its immense size, is much injured by statues affixed to the pillars, and an intermixture of red and white ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... 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 no more prisoners in the Temple, all the keepers ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... have been before the public until Monsieur Delvigue, in 1828, employed a solid conical ball, which, resting on the breech clear of the powder, he expanded by several blows with the ramrod sufficiently to make it take the grooves. Colonel Thouvenin introduced a steel spire into the breech, upon which the ball being forced, it expanded more readily. This spire is called the "tige." Colonel Tamisier cut three rings into the cylindrical surface of the bullet, to facilitate the expansion and improve its flight. These three ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... 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 flash ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... for seen from the Black Hill it looks more like a 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 white, and beside them, with the utmost regularity, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... one old heathen, pointing a withered finger to the handsome spire of the Bang-kah chapel, that lifted itself toward the sky, "Look now, the chapel towers above our temple. It is larger than ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... 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
... Saint-Just and Lebas, gave the chief command to Hoche, 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
... naturally; on, on they flew over the trees, and over the 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 ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... pine logs, carefully dovetailed, with the 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 to ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Saint John's Church spire then I saw, An' I wor rare an' fain, Fer near it stood t'owd parsonage— I cuddant ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... line of the Houses of Parliament, as seen from the Lambeth Embankment, broken only by the two stark and stiff erections at each end. The two towers at the west end of Canterbury were not always uniform. At the northern corner an old Norman tower formerly uplifted a leaden spire one hundred feet high. This rather anomalous arrangement must have had a decidedly lopsided effect, and it is probable that the appearance of the cathedral was changed very much for the better when the spire, which had been taken down in 1705, was replaced by Mr. Austin in ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... many other heaps of atoms have already been, and passed away! Blown hither and thither—where? The universe reels with change. Star-dust and earth-dust are alike in ceaseless whirl. Little it profits to build the spire, the sea-wall, the dome, the bridge, the myriad-roofed town. A new era shall dawn upon them, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... been deemed sacrilege for mortal eyes to view the ancient writings. The single copy is kept in a great vault, built of indestructible metals, and protectively sheathed to last for all Time. The spot above its burial place is marked by a tall spire of stone. ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... the long straight street, and 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 ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... stand before it in daylight. Not a pane of glass is to be found in it; planks and old doors are nailed fast to the window frames; the balls alone still stand on the two towers, broad, heavy, and resembling colossal toadstools. The iron spire of the one still towers aloft in the air; the other spire is bent: like the hands on a sun-dial it shows the time—the time that is gone. The other two balls are half fallen down; lambs frisk about between the beams, and the space below is used as ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... led directly to the village, the sound of the well-known rookery gave that sentimental tinge to the varying sensations of my active soul, which only served to heighten the lustre of the luxuriant scenery. But spying, as I advanced, the spire peeping over the withered tops of the aged elms that composed the rookery, my thoughts flew immediately to the church-yard; and tears of affection, such was the effect of my imagination, bedewed my mother's grave! Sorrow gave place to devotional feelings. I wandered through ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain half-formed sentiment; it is the outrush into manifestation of a grand emotion rooted deep in the knowledge of fact. The man who feels such devotion as this ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... embody,—these have nothing in common,—hardly two things could be named that are more unlike; yet in relation to man they have but one end: for who can hear the ocean when breathing in wrath, and limit it in his mind, though he think not of Him who gives it voice? or ascend that spire without feeling his faculties vanish, as it were with its vanishing point, into the abyss of space? If there be a difference in the effect from these and other objects, it is only in the intensity, the degree of impetus given; as between that from the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 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 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... she looks," 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
... is the height of the schoolroom? Of the schoolhouse? Of the tallest tree near by? Of the nearest church spire? ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... of the sister towns in 1680, Buda was by far "the better half," and Pesth was a tiny spot. You may visit the tomb of Gul Baba, father of the roses, a shrine of pilgrimage to all good Turks. You may find a good quarter of an hour in the Church of St. Matthias, whose spire comes up white amid the green as you turn a corner; a curious monument, that was three centuries a-building; its interior suffused, like St. Mark's, by a golden glow, its coloured windows original in shape, and no two pillars or capitals alike in design, yet all contributing to a quaint ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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 ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... 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 was autumn when he returned and saw from afar the swell behind ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... The old time factory bell has not entirely given way to the steam whistle, nor the simple village spire to the more pretentious ecclesiastical tower of to-day, yet the energizing force of material prosperity has quickened the blood in nearly every hamlet, modernized the old, or built up a new, so that throughout ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... anything, because I'm not sure of myself. How can I be? It is that cher enfant, Lorimer, that said such brave words! See! . . . we arrive; we behold the shore—all black, great, vast! . . . rocks like needles, and, higher than all, this most fierce Jedke—bah! what a name!—straight as the spire of a cathedral. One must be a fly to crawl up it, and we, we are not flies—ma foi! no! Lorimer, he laugh, he yawn—so! He say, 'not for me to-day; I very much thank you!' And then, we watch the sun. Ah! that was grand, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dispersed so as best to accommodate the population. Of these the smallest neighborhood has one for the morning devotions of its inhabitants, and even the solitary inn has its little consecrated building with its miniature spire, for the convenience of pious wayfarers. At Sterzing, a little village beautifully situated at the base of the mountain called the Brenner, and containing, as I should judge, not more than two or three thousand inhabitants, we counted seven churches and chapels within the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... 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
... produce has remained on 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 ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... is this 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 plains, that might be those of some "Promised Land," seem ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... see. There were great springs of courage and tenacity in his nature, and he wished, moreover, to prove his new craft as a woodsman and mountaineer. He remained awhile in the bushes, watching the spire, and presently, to his amazement, it thinned quickly and was gone. It had disappeared swiftly, while the smoke from a fire usually dies down. It was Dick's surmise that the Sioux had put out their ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... clochier in Paul's Churchyard—a bell-house, four square, builded of stone, with four bells; these were called Jesus Bells. The same had a great spire of timber, covered with lead, with the image of St Paul on the top, but was pulled down by Sir Miles Partridge, Kt, in the reign of Henry VIII. The common speech then was that he did set L100 upon a cast at dice against it, and so won the said clochier and bells of the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... from its chambers. 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 through ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... construction, the south aisle flanked by two beautiful chapels and an ornate porch; transepts and a central tower, and choir with flanking chapels. The massive Norman tower contrasts strongly with the delicate Perpendicular spire rising upon it. The church contains many interesting memorials, and, in the nave, a Perpendicular shrine dedicated to St Peter. Near the church is the half-ruined priory house, built in the 17th century, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... dome, and arch, column, and spire, and obelisk, and lofty terraces, and many-windowed palaces, rose in all directions from a mass of building which appeared to him each instant to grow more huge, till at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon. The sun lent additional lustre to the dazzling quays ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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, you do not see piles, like Beauvais, begun on too vast a scale for man's labour ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... presence, for 'company,' as she calls it—nice sort of company, indeed. And it is just the same way with storms. You remember that dreadful gale a month ago, the one that took down the North Grove and blew the spire off Rewtham Church. Well, just when it was at its worst, and I was a-sitting and praying that the roof might keep over our heads, I look round for Angela, and can't see her. 'Some of your tricks again,' thinks I to myself; and just then up comes Mrs. Jakes to say that Sam ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, to look at them and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... 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; ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... keeping Christmas as presents or mince-pie, and gladly set off to walk through the frosty air to the ivy-covered church, shaded by ancient trees. It was situated on a hill, and was approached by numerous paths running across the fields; and as Ellen gazed upon its spire, standing in relief against the deep blue sky, she thought of that beautiful line ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... When she awoke, she found the sun streaming into the room. She walked to the window and gazed out into the lovely, sunny grounds and wooded walks surrounding the castle. In the distance, she could see the spire of the grand cathedral. ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... 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. It occurs ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... bestow a child on him." When her 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 him and asked, ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... immense expanse of shimmering river, with long, rich meadows beyond, between which the wide flood breaks into three different branches. Red and white sails flit down them. Here and there rises a line of pollard willows or clipt elms, and now and then a church spire. On the nearest shore an ancient windmill, colored in delicate tints of gray and yellow, surmounts ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... opportunities for climbing, as the sweetest and largest clusters were always at the very top of the trees. The limbs of the grey birch, although small, are very elastic and tough, making a sure footing for the climber. The danger was, that, as he approached the slender spire of the tree, it would suddenly bend or break and drop him into the water. This was all the more fun, if he could swim. When he reached home he was liable to have his jacket not only dried but "warmed," which was the colloquial for a thrashing. I usually sold grapes enough during the day of the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... 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 got so much into the habit of finding ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... buffalo cart, and the hacks for hire, of which latter there are nine hundred licensed. The canal is filled with country boats of excellent model, and the warehouses are crammed with goods. Money seems to be abundant and things dear. They are just finishing a tasteful Gothic church, with a tall spire, which is a notable landmark as you approach; they are also completing officers' quarters on a hill which commands the town. Barracks for three or four regiments lie unoccupied a couple of miles outside the city, and a ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... proud falls magnificently lost, But clear and artless, pouring through the plain Health to the sick, and solace to the swain. Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows? Whose seats the weary traveller repose? Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise? "The Man of Ross," each lisping babe replies. Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread! The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread; He feeds yon almshouse, neat, but void of state, Where age and want sit ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... closed their doors, and said that Christmas would be cold. In a quarter of an hour they saw their chronology late by a day. In half an hour they noted a gray mist drive across the sky. There was a faint wavering and spreading and deflection at the top of the tallest spire of smoke. Somewhere, high above, there passed a swarm ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... 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 got so much into the habit of finding him ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the right, a nursery-garden of shrubs and rose-trees separated from the road by a wide ditch full of water; then, in the middle distance, the buildings of a farm; to the left, a clump of trees and another ditch, and further back the spire of a church; a huntsman, with a gun on his shoulder and preceded by his dog, is walking on the road, and two peasants—a man and a woman—have stopped to chat on the path that leads across to the farm; a horticulturist is grafting the shrubs in the nursery-garden; ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... one would 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 ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee. It was twilight as he entered the village of Callam, and, asking a homeward-bound labourer the way to Daniel Knott's, learned that it was by the church, which showed its stumpy ivy-clad spire on a slight elevation of ground; a useful addition to the means of identifying that desirable homestead afforded by Daniel's description—'the prittiest place iver you see'—though a small cow-yard full of excellent ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... slip out of a night, and to go to that there beastly churchyard, saving your presence, for 'company,' as she calls it—nice sort of company, indeed. And it is just the same way with storms. You remember that dreadful gale a month ago, the one that took down the North Grove and blew the spire off Rewtham Church. Well, just when it was at its worst, and I was a-sitting and praying that the roof might keep over our heads, I look round for Angela, and can't see her. 'Some of your tricks again,' thinks I to myself; and just then up comes Mrs. Jakes to say that Sam had seen ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Presbyterians; all brought and all adopted this great truth, and all have sustained it. And where there is any religious sentiment amongst men at all, this sentiment incorporates itself with the law. Every thing declares it. The massive cathedral of the Catholic; the Episcopalian church, with its lofty spire pointing heavenward; the plain temple of the Quaker; the log church of the hardy pioneer of the wilderness; the mementos and memorials around and about us; the consecrated graveyards, their tombstones and epitaphs, their silent vaults, their mouldering contents; all attest it. The dead prove ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Germain, "and the farm, and your house too. Look, that little gray speck, not far from the great poplar at Godard, just below the church-spire." ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... morning, July 5th, 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 down the valley. ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... 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, ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... 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 ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... every direction by the panting steam-car or lightning telegraph, was then an almost unbroken forest, save where the wide prairie rolled its billows of grass towards the western mountains, or was lost in the sterile, salt, and sandy plains of the southwest. No city raised to heaven spire, dome, or minaret; no plough turned up the rich, alluvial soil; no metal dug from the bowels of the earth had been fashioned into instruments to aid man in the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and Wolfe, enemies in life but united in death and fame. Directly below is the market which recalls the name of Champlain, the founder of Quebec, and his first Canadian home at the margin of the river. On the same historic ground we see the high-peaked roof and antique spire of the curious old church, Notre-Dame des Victoires, which was first built to commemorate the repulse of an English fleet two centuries ago. Away beyond, to the left, we catch a glimpse of the meadows and cottages of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, and directly ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... 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 passed ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Moscow's minarets Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets! 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain—he saw thee—how? with spire And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match, To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch, To this the merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall—and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... 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 a day would ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... to have blown her a considerable distance. A few bees are always found with her, which probably serve as her aids, and greatly assist the apiarian in spying her out. She is frequently found near the ground, on a spire of grass, the fence, or any place most convenient for her to alight, when her strength fails her. I once had quite a search for her majesty, without much apparent success. At the same time there ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks
... mass at seven altars in it without hearing each other; and it was all to be built of flint stone and to be richly carved. When the time was nearly up the church was finished, all but the top of the spire; and St. Olaf was in sad trouble about his promise. So he walked out into a wood to think, and there he heard the Troll's wife hushing her child inside a hill, and saying to it, "To-morrow, Wind and Weather, your father, will come home in the morning, and bring with him the sun and the moon, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... altar there are very large gratings of iron, with rich ornaments in marble and mosaic, that look down therein. This building is flanked on one of the sides by two sacristies, and by a very high campanile, namely, five times as high as it is broad. It had on top a very high octagonal spire, but this was removed because it threatened to fall. This whole work was brought to a finish in the space of four years, and no more, by the genius of Maestro Jacopo Tedesco and by the solicitude of Frate Elia, after whose death, to the end that such a pile might never through any lapse ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... A shadow that lifts clear and floats— The cabin'd village round the shore, The landing and the fringe of boats; Faint films of smoke that curl and wreathe, And upward with the like desire The vast gray church that seems to breathe In heaven with its dreaming spire. ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... right the wall excluded any glimpse of the Bishop's garden, and beyond loomed the Cathedral, with two grey pigeons circling about its spire. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... writer's own style and school, which are well known at all times, and have never been more frequent than recently. But Boule de Suif? Among the others that pleasant and pathetic person was not a boule; she was a pyramid, a Colossus, a spire of Cologne Cathedral. Putting the unconventionality of its subject aside, there is absolutely no fault to be found with the story. It is as round and smooth as "Boule ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... high, and bristling with broken glass, above which all that one saw of 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 director concealed ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... 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 gave to jagged shapes and terraces of rock ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... took the form of collecting pipes and toys, of which he had innumerable specimens from the ends of the earth. He kept also one thousand five hundred horses and a thousand dogs and cats. Every traveler had to take off his hat and bow at sight of the spire, on pain of being beaten by ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... day, and received his death-wound in the very eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the cathedrals in England. The magnificent church in question suffered cruelly upon this, and other occasions; the principal spire being ruined by the fire of ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Tell me, why With ghastly wounds do I behold thee scarred?' To such vain quest he cared not to reply, But, heaving from his breast a deep-drawn sigh, 'Fly, Goddess-born! and get thee from the fire! The foes,' he said, 'are on the ramparts. Fly! All Troy is tumbling from her topmost spire. No more can Priam's land, nor ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... forth in their orbits, and guides their glorious way, producing "the music of the spheres." Order stretched the very layers of the everlasting rocks like ribs around the earth, and shaped the crystals of the cavern. There is order in the structure of every spire of grass, of every flower and shrub, of every tree and trembling leaf; in the mechanism of every animal, from man in his godlike attitude, to the smallest microscopic tribes. All organic existences ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... that marked the line of Salmon River vanished, and the ocean was gone. A few sails still gleamed on the waters of the bay; but the advancing fog wiped them out one by one, crept across the steel-blue expanse, swallowed up the white mills and single spire of Logport, and, joining with reinforcements from the marshes, moved solemnly upon the hills. Ten minutes more and the landscape was utterly blotted out; simultaneously the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole over sea and shore. The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... church. Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small flag—the Tricolor of France—still fluttered from a window where some one had stuck it. We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its door—a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And through the door we saw half a loaf of ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... scurvy knaves, ripe fruit for gallows-tree; Or else the sexton's son"—here Wyndham laughed, Though not a man of mirth—indeed, a man Of niggard humor; but that sexton's son— Lean as the shadow cast by a church spire, Eyes deep in the sockets, noseless, high cheek-boned, Like nothing in the circle of this earth But a death's-head that from a mural slab Within the chancel leers through sermon-time, Making a mock of poor mortality. The ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 afterwards. The spire of the parish church, known as the auld kirk, commands a view of the square, from which the entrance to the kirkyard would be visible, if it were not hidden by the town-house. The kirkyard has long been crammed, and is not now in use, but the church is sufficiently large ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... her determination she avoided the town main street, and struck off by the narrow turning which led through the old churchyard, with its grand lime-tree avenue and venerable church, whose crocketed spire was a landmark for all the ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Aylmer that 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, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... open windows of the house, she led 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 ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... drew near to Rangoon they saw on the hill, near by, the great Shway Dagon Pagoda with its tall, gilded spire shining in the sun with a brilliancy that was dazzling. But soon they turned from gazing at the Mecca of the Burmese Buddhists to view the town, a big collection of bamboo and mat huts protected by forts with guns, which the people fondly believed would utterly destroy any foreign fleet ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... irrecoverably departed volume, entitled, "The Wars of the Lord" quoted by Moses in the Pentateuch. Put it up, Wellingborough, put it up, my dear friend; and hereafter follow your nose throughout Liverpool; it will stick to you through thick and thin: and be your ship's mainmast and St. George's spire ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the amber mist, That softly wreathes each mountain-spire, The sky its clustered columns kissed, And touched ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hotel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... they belittle their work with children and pine for the kind of teaching which the virtuosos attempt to do, let them realize that they are in a sense the foundation of the structure, and although perhaps not as conspicuous as the spire which towers up into the skies, they ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... altered. The lower part of the lane has totally disappeared; also its adjunct, the King's Mews, where now stands the royal National Gallery, while the church of St. Martin's rears its majestic portico and spire, no longer obscured by its former adjacent common buildings; and the grand naval pillar lately erected to the memory of Britain's hero, Nelson, occupies the centre of the new quadrangle now ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Quebec, which was consecrated in 1804, on the 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 ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... looked down upon the beauty at his feet and felt its loveliness blindly. A passing thrill of wonder and devotion fled through his fourteen-year-old soul as he regarded it idly. Down there was home and all his interests and loyalty. His eyes dwelt affectionately on the pointing spire and bell tower. He loved those bells, and the one who played them, and under their swelling tones had been awakened new thoughts and lofty purposes. He knew they were lofty. He was not yet altogether sure that they were his, but they were there in his mind for him to think ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... impression did the sequestered village make on me, with its open green and neat cottages, surrounded by pretty gardens; and its clear pond, with gravelly bed; and its neighbouring coppice; and its quiet church, with graceful spire; and the neat and unpretending parsonage; and the old minister, with thin cheeks and long white hair, and grave, yet kind loving countenance, to whom all smiled and courtesied or doffed their hats as he passed; and the long low school-house, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... here 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 poplar ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... bewildered by the lusty life and growth and the maze of new-made streets of the future city, the laggard stands debating with that other self, that genius that has kept him what he is. Fancy his striking attitude, thumbs in arm-pits and eyes rolling up to some tall spire, crying out to his other self, 'Thou canst not say I helped do this! Shake not thy towseled locks at me!'—By gosh, it will ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 with which life had since endowed ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... quickly followed. Only by dejected appeals and a promise not to injure Gustavus Vasa did they succeed in escaping from the tower, and the Dalmen, thinking that some of them might remain concealed in the narrow spire, shot their arrows at it from every side. For more than a hundred years after some of these arrows remained sticking ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... framed in rich green foliage. Up in the hill where swayed the old hemlock with the eagle's nest for a crown rises an observatory. From the top one gazes in summer into a billowy sea of green in which the spire of the Methodist church rises like a ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... she rather dreaded than sought for the first view of that well-known spire which would announce her within twenty miles of home. Salisbury she had known to be her point on leaving Northanger; but after the first stage she had been indebted to the post-masters for the names of the places which were then to conduct her to it; so great had been her ignorance of her route. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of their shots cut the flagstaff of the admiral, and the cross of St. George fell into the river. It drifted with the tide towards the north shore; whereupon several Canadians paddled out in a birch canoe, secured it, and brought it back in triumph. On the spire of the cathedral in the Upper Town had been hung a picture of the Holy Family, as an invocation of divine aid. The Puritan gunners wasted their ammunition in vain attempts to knock it down. That it escaped their malice was ascribed to miracle, but the miracle ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... You shall not be the Graue of your deseruing, Rome must know the value of her owne: 'Twere a Concealement worse then a Theft, No lesse then a Traducement, To hide your doings, and to silence that, Which to the spire, and top of prayses vouch'd, Would seeme but modest: therefore I beseech you, In signe of what you are, not to reward What you haue done, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... palace itself. It stands almost four-square, and above rises the beautiful tower, the highest tower in the city, with a gallery similar to the last storey of the palace, and above a loggia borne by four pillars, from which spring the great arches of the canopy that supports the spire; and whereas the battlements of the palazzo are square and Guelph, those of the tower are Ghibelline in the shape of the tail of the swallow. Set, not in the centre of the square, nor made to close it, but on one side, it was thus placed, it is said, in order to avoid the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the Adversus gentes, and Lactance in the De falsa religione. If Juvenal, Martial, Petronius, are more reticent, it is because they were not Fathers of the Church, nor yet antiquarians. No one among us exacts a description of a spire. The phallus was as common to them, commoner even. It was on the coins, on the doors, in the gardens. As a preservative against Envy it hung from children's necks. On sun-dials and water clocks it marked the flight of time. The vestals worshipped it. At ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... and walked to the temple. It looked like an exaggerated bell, the spire being the handle, and the lower portion looking like an enormous flight of circular stairs for the roof. It was over two hundred feet high. Attached to it in the rear was a structure with a pitched roof. They bought photographs of it at the stand of a native who spoke ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... sees a standard of intelligence, high-breeding, and piety pervading the entire State. The log-cabin gives way to the comfortable mansion, the broad fields usurping the forest's claim, and the beautiful church-building pointing its taper spire up to heaven, where stood the rude log-house, and where first he preached. He has lived on and watched this growing moral and physical beauty, whose germs he planted, and whose fruits he is now enjoying in the eighty-fourth ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... refused to find anything to interest him, still less to move him, in a silent street with a noble spire detaching itself vaguely from the luminous blue depths of a midnight sky, because, he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use? You might as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as easy to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking behind ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... having returned with word that all was right, we went ahead at a fearful pace on a very good road, lined with poplars, and running through a neat park-like country. Over to the right we could see the church-spire of Oyarzun, and the smoke curling from the chimneys; a little farther on we passed the debris of a diligence on the wayside; the telegraph wires along the route were broken down, and the poles taken away for firewood; we dived under a railway ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... any strollings now at even-close Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long Her eyes were on the ground; 'tis July, strong Now; and, because white dust-clouds ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... founding of the Institute no such thing was foreseen; but in 1859 Polterham was hardly conscious of the stirrings of that new life which, in the course of twenty years, was to transform the town. In those days a traveller descending the slope of the Banwell Hills sought out the slim spire of Polterham parish church amid a tract of woodland, mead and tillage; now the site of the thriving little borough was but too distinctly marked by trails of smoke from several gaunt chimneys—that of Messrs. Dimes & Nevison's blanket-factory, that of Quarrier & Son's sugar-refinery, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... quiet tide the westering sun Gleams mildly; and the lengthening shadows dun, Chequered with ruddy streaks from spire and roof, Begin to weave fair twilight's mystic woof; Till the dim tissue, like a gorgeous veil, Wraps the proud ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... scholars, were formed the vernacular languages—German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.—that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and flying buttress, with lofty spire and delicate tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts, quaint gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored paintings of surpassing beauty—all betokened the great Christian, or Gothic, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... her stood Eight daughters of the plow, stronger than men, Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain, And labor. Each was like a Druid rock, Or like a spire of land that stands apart Cleft from the main and wall'd ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal water,—their necessity to the completion of a landscape. I recollect well having the value of a stern straight line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had become quite dulled and wearied with the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 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 spire was adorned ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... 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 the great Finner ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... God's own hallowed day Had painted yonder spire with gold, And, calling sinful men to pray, Loud, long, and deep the bell ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... railway carriage. As we are borne rapidly along we notice that the telegraph posts which are set close to the line appear to fly past us in the contrary direction; the trees, houses, and other things beyond go by too, but not so fast; objects a good way off displace slowly; while some spire, or tall landmark, in the far distance appears to remain unmoved during a ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... Their restoration was completed in 1902. Behind the Rathaus is the Grashaus, in which Richard of Cornwall, king of the Romans, is said to have held his court. It was restored in 1889 to accommodate the municipal archives. The cathedral is of great historic and architectural interest. Apart from the spire, which was rebuilt in 1884, it consists of two parts of different styles and date. The older portion, the capella in palatio, an octagonal building surmounted by a dome, was designed on the model of San Vitale ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... abasement, promptly was I seized upon by a burly porter and bidden, with a cuff, to mind my manners. Then I discovered the occasion of the crowd to be a little procession of choristers out of a neighbouring church—St. Jean of the Spire it was, though I knew then no name for it. The boys were singing, the watchers quiet, bareheaded. They sang as if there were nothing in the world but piety and love. The last level rays of the sun crowned them with radiant aureoles, painted their white robes with glory. I shut my eyes, dazzled; ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the soft palm, upturned to a lordly salary, and archi- 142:12 tectural skill, making dome and spire tremulous with beauty, turn the poor and the stranger from the gate, they at the same time shut the door on 142:15 progress. In vain do the manger and the cross tell their story to pride and fustian. Sensuality palsies the right ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... 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
... all sides. A holly 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, ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... is replaced by a horizontal reflecting surface, such as a pond (Fig. 132), the same thing happens. The point at which the ray from the reflection of the spire's tip to the eye appears to pass through the surface of the water must be so situated that if a line were drawn perpendicular to it from the surface the angles made by lines drawn from the real spire tip and from the observer's ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... wonderful. But 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 slowly ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Charles of Lorraine, ordered the 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 forest of d'Armstadt; from this situation he made ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Vendramin, waving his hand in the direction of San Marco. "Can you see a single pinnacle or spire that stands straight? Do you not perceive that the sea ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... towers; nor Susa's bastions; nor Persepolis' pediments. Round and round, the Moorish turret at Seville was not wound heavenward in the revolution of a day; and from its first founding, five hundred years did circle, ere Strasbourg's great spire lifted its five hundred feet into the air. No: nor were the great grottos of Elephanta hewn out in an hour; nor did the Troglodytes dig Kentucky's Mammoth Cave in a sun; nor that of Trophonius, nor Antiparos; nor ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Gloomy as usual, brother! Brooding on fancy's eggs. God did not send The light that all day long gladdened the earth, Flashed from the snowy peak, and on the spire Transformed the weathercock into a star, That you should gloom within stone walls all day. At dawn to-morrow, take your staff, and come: We will salute the breezes, as they rise And leave their lofty beds, laden with odours Of melting snow, and fresh damp earth, and moss— Imprisoned ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or 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 ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... chambers. 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 through ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Spire of old Trinity, Never again to be Seamark and goal to me As I walk down; Chimes on the upper air, Calling in vain to prayer, Squandering your music where Roars ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... joy. The forgotten bishop who, I know not how many centuries ago, laid the foundations of Cologne Cathedral, and the workmen who, a few years since, took down the old crane that had stood for long years on the spire, and completed it to the slender apex, were partners in one work that reached ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... basilican altar in London, newly consecrated as a sign of its papal dignities and privileges. And beyond that again London; and yet again London, a wonderful white city, gleaming at a thousand points with cross and spire and dome and pinnacle, patched with green in square and park and open space—London come back again at last to her ancient ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... escaping, reduced 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
... Charles, covered with green fields and ripening harvests, and dotted with quaint old homesteads, redolent with memories of Normandy and Brittany, rose a long mountain ridge covered with primeval woods, on the slope of which rose the glittering spire of Charlebourg, once a dangerous outpost of civilization. The pastoral Lairet was seen mingling its waters with the St. Charles in a little bay that preserves the name of Jacques Cartier, who with his hardy companions spent their first winter ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to lengthen across the valley as the Ark rounded a bend in the stream and the little church spire of Fontanelle came into view. "There it is—at last!" cried Mother Meraut. "Thank God, something of the village still stands!" She gazed eagerly into the distance. "And there is the Chateau," she added joyfully, pointing to a large ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius. With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from the straggling street; beyond that, a mass ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... some soothing and beautiful Psalms, which took his companion's mind back to his native mountains, and the white spire of the village church where he had worshipped with his mother. The hard lines melted in his face as he listened, but Paul fell upon a bitter verse, and the agent's conscience began to trouble him. He could not look into the boy's eyes, for they seemed to rebuke him, and ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... shadowy forms of distant objects grow gradually clearer. Where before some tall and misty mountain peak was seen, we now descry patches of deepest blue and sombre olive; the mellow corn and the waving woods, the village spire and the lowly cot, come out of the landscape; and like some well-remembered voice, they speak of home. The objects we have seen, the sounds we have heard a hundred times before without interest, become to us now things that stir ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... on a wide street of my home town, opposite a church with a graceful spire. This white or silver-leaved poplar has for many years been a regular prey of the gang of tree-trimmers, utterly without knowledge of or regard for trees, that infests this town. They hack it shamefully, and I look at it and say, "Well, ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... Winchelsea—especially the one in which the lady takes he ease in her hammock (on a sociable, shady terrace, from which the ground drops), and looks at red Rye, across the marshes. Another garden where a contemplative hammock would be in order is the lovely canonical plot at Salisbury, with the everlasting spire above it tinted in the summer sky—unless, in the same place, you should choose to hook yourself up by the grassy bank of the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the meadows, the cattle, the distant willows across the river, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... sameness rose a hill in that abrupt manner which strikes a peculiar character into this southern landscape, and upon the hill were jutting rocks and a broken mass of strangely-jumbled masonry-roofs rising out of roofs, gables crushing gables, feudal towers, great walls, and one tall heaven-pointing spire. This was St. Emilion, respected in the Middle Ages as a strong fortress of the Bordelais, and now so famous for its wine that the locality has long ceased to produce more than an insignificant part of that which is put into bottles bearing the name of a saint who drank nothing stronger than ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... were partially concealed by young elms, silver-poplars, and water-maples. Gardens sloped on either bank to the water's edge. Neat, white houses gleamed through the trees and shrubbery around the bases of the hills that hem in the valley; and the tall, slender spire of the meeting-house shewed fairly against its densely-wooded background. Verily, if I were a painter, I should desire no lovelier scene for my canvas than that on which Mark and Mildred looked. Lizzy walked away, and began ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... who, placing some benches in the aisle for the temporary accommodation of his new parishioners, made every effort to raise funds to build and endow an additional church. He succeeded, as we have heard; and it was the tall white spire of the now Church of St. Austin's, which greeted Anne Merton's delighted eyes, as on the 27th of August, she, with her father and mother, came to the top of a long hill, about five miles from Abbeychurch. What that sight was to her, only those who have ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reasons that buildings and trees are struck by 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 flash will leap to the church, five hundred feet of obstacle being removed. The highest ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... at my side White pond lilies open wide. Underneath the pine's tall spire Cardinal blossoms burn like fire. They are gone; the golden-rod Flashes from the dark green sod. Crickets in the grass I hear; Asters ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in surveying the numerous traces of desolation in Turkey was soon effaced at Belgrade. Here all was life and activity. It was at the period of my first visit, in 1839, quite an oriental town; but now the haughty parvenu spire of the cathedral throws into the shade the minarets of the mosques, graceful even in decay. Many of the bazaar-shops have been fronted and glazed. The oriental dress has become much rarer; and houses several stories high, in the German fashion, are ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... which led directly to the village, the sound of the well-known rookery gave that sentimental tinge to the varying sensations of my active soul, which only served to heighten the lustre of the luxuriant scenery. But spying, as I advanced, the spire peeping over the withered tops of the aged elms that composed the rookery, my thoughts flew immediately to the church-yard; and tears of affection, such was the effect of my imagination, bedewed my mother's grave! Sorrow gave place to devotional feelings. I wandered through the church in ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... width, having great and 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
... shall not be The grave of your deserving; Rome must know The value of her own: 'twere a concealment Worse than a theft, no less than a traducement, To hide your doings; and to silence that Which, to the spire and top of praises vouch'd, Would seem but modest: therefore, I beseech you,— In sign of what you are, not to reward What you have done,—before our army ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... 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. On his right rose that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... for the jagged ice-peaks were coming rather near. I held my breath as the little plane veered around a slender black spire and dropped toward a tiny scrap of smooth snow among the ice-hummocks. I might have spared my anxiety. Under Ray's consumately skilful piloting, the skids struck the snow with hardly a shock. We glided swiftly over the ice and ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... 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 yellow ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... Love, the life-giving Prin- ciple of Christianity, shall speedily wake the long night [30] of materialism, and the universal dawn shall break upon the spire of this temple. The ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... 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 ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist, and the vers librist, one swims into the splendours of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by Francis Thompson, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the impression. They beheld a town of sufficiently imposing proportions composed of houses built upon European notions of architecture, but without any of the huddle usual in European cities. The spire of a church rose dominantly above the red roofs, a fort guarded the entrance of the wide harbour, with guns thrusting their muzzles between the crenels, and the wide facade of Government House revealed itself dominantly ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... looked at the burning, dry little main street, the white cottages that faced the station from behind their blazing gardens; she looked at the locust trees that almost hid the church spire, at the straggling line of eucalyptus trees that followed the country road to the graveyard a mile away. It was home. It was all she had known of the world—and she was going away into a terrifying new life. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... number. It was a house like any other in the street—like any other in any other street. For St. Petersburg is a monstrous town, showing a flat face to the world, exhibiting to the sky a flat expanse of roof broken here and there by some startling inequality, the dagger-like spire of St. Peter and St. Paul, the great roof of the Kasan Cathedral, the dome of St. Isaac's—the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... in Yaxley. The house was of no great size, but built of stone, picturesque, and of 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 ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... beheld 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 arm, screaming, "You shall not have it!" and, turning, ran ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... its way than the grande place in the very heart of the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle- work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep tragedies, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 from a Buddhist temple, even though it pour ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... of erection are placed in long rows round a low wall. The building is of Bath stone, and has flying buttresses and a high square tower. In the interior it presents the greatest possible contrast to the old church. Here there is great height, the arches are pointed, the stonework light. The spire is 142 feet high, and the interior 130 feet long by 60 broad. From the interior vault of the roof to the pavement the height is 60 feet. Over the Communion-table is "The Entombment of Christ," an oil-painting by J. Northcote, R.A. To the north of the church ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... town was shelled, and the municipal offices and big buildings in the centre were utterly destroyed, but three buildings stand conspicuously among the ruins. These are two churches, and the Town Hall, with a spire resembling that of a church. The fact that the building next to the latter was leveled utterly, while not a single shell entered the supposed church, indicates that the Russian practice at 5,000 meters was sufficiently accurate to insure the protection of sacred edifices, while neighboring ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Spire, a poor bookbinder, roasted in a fire made of his own books, in the massacre of ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... 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 ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... ingenious gentleman of that country, which is, by taking trunchions of two or three foot long, at the beginning of Winter, and to bind them in faggots, and place the ends of them in water 'till towards the Spring, by which season they will have contracted a swelling spire, or knurr about that part, which being set, does (like the gennet-moil apple-tree) never fail of growing and striking root. There is a black sort more affected to woods, and drier grounds; and bears a black berry, not so frequently found; ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... years Joe Robertson had been the pilot of Fairport, and was as well known to the frequenters of that harbor as was the tall spire which was the pride of the town. The sound of war had, however, roused within him the spirit of his father of Revolutionary memory. He declared he would not have it said that Joe Robertson was content to play door-keeper to the harbor of Fairport, ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... 1716 during service some pieces of stone from the spire of St. Mary's fell on the roof of the church. The congregation, thinking that the steeple was coming down, in their alarm broke through the windows. Johnson, we may well believe, witnessed the scene. The church was pulled down, and the new one was opened in Dec. 1721. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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 him, as ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... curved outwards at the top, so that ascent was out of the question. Close to us was the high thin pinnacle of rock which I believe I mentioned earlier in this narrative. It is like a broad red church spire, the top of it being level with the plateau, but a great chasm gaping between. On the summit of it there grew one high tree. Both pinnacle and cliff were comparatively low—some five or six ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
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