C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Spire

Magnific walls, and heaven-assaulting spires.

Smart.

Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?

Pope.

Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires!

Dyer.

These pointed spires, that wound the ambient sky.

Prior.

Nought but the heaven-directed spire.

Wordsworth.

How the tall temples, as to meet their gods,
Ascend the skies!

Young.

The tapering pyramid,—whose spiky top has wounded the thick cloud.

Blair.

Thy best type, desire of the sad heart,—the heaven-ascending spire.

Bulwer-Lytton.

Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds.

Shakespeare.

Ye swelling hills and spacious plains!
Besprent from shore to shore with steeple towers,
And spires whose “silent finger points to heaven.”

Wordsworth.

View not this spire by measure given,
To buildings raised by common hands;
That fabric rises high as heaven,
Whose basis on devotion stands.

Prior.

The 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.

Rogers.

Where’er a spire points up to heaven,
Through storm and summer air,
Telling that all around have striven,
Man’s heart, and hope, and prayer.

Mrs. Hemans.

An instinctive 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.

S. T. Coleridge.

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