On Tour

Abstract

The tower, a romantic poem in stone, a delicate hymn, with its gentle lines of silent eternal beauty, was a sixteenth-century work (although begun earlier) in the Gothic style—but a Gothic tempered, it could be said, by an instinctive sense of prudence and harmony which curbed the vulgar excesses of such architecture. One could gaze at that stone finger, which showed the way to heaven, for hours on end without tiring. It was not one of those towers with spires so delicate that they seem to be on the point of snapping, spindly rather than slender, and full of affectation like overdressed young ladies who lace their corsets tightly. This tower was a solid one, but no less charged with spiritual grandeur for all that; it rose like a mighty castle to its upper gallery, adorned with elegant balustrades, from which it launched itself upwards in the shape of a graceful, tapering pyramid, inimitable in its measurements and proportions. Like a mass of muscle and sinew, stone, wreathing around stone, climbed skywards, balancing acrobatically in midair; and as if by some marvelous feat of juggling, a great gilded bronze sphere stood upon the tip of the limestone pyramid, seemingly held there by magnetism, and on top of this sphere was a smaller one and on this a cross of iron surmounted by a lightning conductor. (21)