Towers

“ In place of one or two such towers, standing solitary and sublime, its buttresses along the sides shoot up into as many separate pinnacles, surmounted by statues, which, as they gleam in the last rays of sunset, or under the full moon, seem like angelic sentinels ranged along the heavenly battlements. These details of the exterior draw away the eye from the vastness of the structure as a whole, which only bursts upon us as we enter within. ”

“ In the disturbed times of the city, every large edifice was a fortress, and every powerful family had its tower. By and by the possession of such a building became a mark of splendour and distinction; and as, at last, a perpendicular tower was a common and every-day thing, an oblique one was built. Both architect and owner have obtained their object: the multitude of slender, upright towers are just looked at, and all hurry to see the leaning one. ”

“ On all sides Corinthian columns, plain or fluted, little towers with crenelated tops, and a mass of kiosks meet the eye. Lions rampant are mounted on the battlements, whilst curious gargoyles protrude from every corner. From story to story we have the rise of the central tower, each platform being marked by the octagonal towers at the corners, and the winding flight of stairs. The dome which crowns the top is formed by the "intersection of two semicircular arches built up with steps and balustrades, which look not unlike arcs boutant or flying buttresses." ”

“ It is a forest of campaniles, chimneys, sky-lights, domes, and towers, in lace-work and open-work, twisted according to a caprice which excludes neither harmony nor unity, and which ornaments with the Gothic F the salamanders and also the mosaics of slate imitating marble,—a singular poverty in the midst of so much wealth. The beautiful open-worked tower of the large staircase dominates the entire mass of pinnacles and steeples, and bathes in the blue sky its colossal fleur-de-lis, the last point of the highest pinnacle among pinnacles, the highest crown among all crowns.... ”

“ For that is the note of this west front and of this great tower, rising in stage upon stage of masonry until the great blocks of stone, dwarfed by distance, look like so many courses of grey brick. So does a child build up towers and castles of wooden blocks. ”

“ THE FULFILLED DREAM More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed— Great rocks hoisted in air; And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . . And so he did not mention his dream of falling But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by And the small tree swell beneath him . . . He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife, Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,— And so went out . ”

“ There is no such thing as a roof in any part; towers, hall, kitchen, all are open to the sky. One round tower, directly overhanging the railway, is so shattered by the falling away of the lower part, that you can look quite up into it and through it, while sitting in the cars; and yet it has stood thus, without falling into complete ruin, for more than two hundred years. I think that it was in this tower that we found the castle oven, an immense cavern, big enough to bake bread for an army. ”

“ They place, for symmetry, towers only at the angles of the walls, instead of all along the curtain, and gather up and press into the same field all the venerable and interesting features of the country, those behind the artist's back, and at his sides, as well as what appears in front. ”

“ Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers. ”

“ Here and there was an open window, where they lingered and leaned, looking out into the warm dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued historic hills, at the stately, shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. ”

“ Norman Central Towers are very low and massive, seldom rising more than a square above the roof, sometimes not so much, the ridge of the original roof, as shewn by the weather-table on the face of the tower, being only just below the parapet. ”

“ I rode northwards from the ’Ashiḳ for exactly an hour to the ruins of Ḥuweiṣilât where there are traces of a wall set with towers. One tower alone stood to any height; it appeared to mark the north-west corner of a rectangular enclosure, in the centre of which was a mound covered with fragments of tiles, but the east side of the enclosing wall was so completely destroyed that I could not make out the line of it. ”

“ In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. ”

“ Built up against the inner side of the wall of circuit are the remains of a series of massive towers, the tops of which, as they are, strangely enough, shorter than the external structure, can never have communicated with the battlements, unless by ladders. The finest of these towers, together with a magnificent fragment of wall, faces the eastern desert. ”

“ The base of the great round tower, prominent in all the prints of the castle in the time of its greatest glory, fragments of the lower parts of other towers and some dungeons or magazines are practically the only features of the historic site that the imagination finds to feed upon. ”

“ What seems to be the most ancient part is a high quadrangular tower with lofty pointed pannels in the four walls; and though inferior in antiquity, an observer accustomed only to the English castellated style, is struck by the variety of numerous circular towers with conical roofs, resembling those which flanked the gates of the town. ”

“ Each tower is of a good ten paces in height and of breadth in proportion. The Upper Part of these towers is round, and girt all along with bells, the top of the gold tower with gilded bells and the silver tower with silvered bells, insomuch that whenever the wind blows among these bells they tinkle. ”

“ We have high towers, the highest about half a mile in height, and some of them likewise set upon high mountains, so that the vantage of the hill with the tower is in the highest of them three miles at least. And these places we call the upper region. We use these towers, according to their several heights and situations, for insolation, refrigeration, conservation, and for the view of divers meteors, as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors. ”

“ What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again. ”

“ THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. ”

“ The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air, as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded, told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora’s youth; ”

“ On raising your head you see a kind of dome, formed by the interior of the tower of which we have already spoken; it is a gulf of sculptures, arabesques, statues, little columns, ribs, lancets, and pendentives—enough to give you a vertigo. If you looked at it for two years, you would not see it all. It is as crowded together as the leaves of a cabbage, and fenestrated like a fish-slice; it is as gigantic as a pyramid and as delicate as a woman’s ear-ring, and you cannot understand how such a piece of filigree-work has remained suspended in the air for so many centuries. ”

“ No man dared rebuild the tower that had fallen; not even Alan, or perhaps he did not want to, being possessed, as we may well believe, by this Idea. What it was you shall hear, although, to be sure, no words have any power to picture to those who have not seen it what this great and original work is like. The fallen tower had been reared, as is the manner of such central towers, upon four great pillars where nave and choir and transepts met. ”

“ The White Tower or Keep.—This is the very heart and centre of the Tower buildings, and all the lesser towers and connecting walls, making the Inner and Outer Wards, and the broad moat{110} encircling all, are but the means of protection and inviolable security of this ancient keep. Within its rock-like walls a threatened king could live in security. ”

“ Many houses have two towers, and the wealthier people have towers of great size subdivided again into small turrets; but in all cases the height of these edifices is the same, or nearly so, so that the villages received from them a very monumental look. ”

“ The other structures in the enclosure are the famous Towers, nine in number, about twelve feet in height and thirty in diameter. In the side of each tower is a double door of iron, where the bearers enter with the bodies of the dead; through these doors no person, not even a Parsee, with the exception of the attendants, is permitted to look; and if any one passes within twenty yards of a tower he is required to bathe and change his clothing before leaving the grounds. ”

“ The only structure like a tower, if we except the turrets on the city walls and watch towers erected within the past few years, when the Tae-Pings have threatened the city, is a tall, white monument, rising to the height of twenty feet, and without inscription or distinguishing mark of any kind. ”

“ There are towers to climb at Kenilworth, as well as towers to gaze at, and with that passion for ascending steps which marks the young the two made their way to the top of one tower after another. It was as they leaned on the parapet of the third and looked out over the green country that Edward broke off in an unflattering anecdote of my Lord of Leicester. ”

“ They are invariably of heterogeneous architecture; the main building always dates from some earlier reign than the wings which are added to it afterwards under the reign of such and such a king. The towers are in a dilapidated state. * * * Reader, there are no towers. A tower is an idea, a dream. ”

“ The towers, thirty-six feet square, are of solid masonry, and are crowned each with two stories or suites of rooms, in which architectural beauty is consulted as well as strength, and which are of great magnificence. ”

“ The towers are massive and lofty, being 220 feet in height. The right-hand tower may be ascended, and the view to be had well rewards the effort of climbing. It contains the big bell, weighing nearly 30,000 pounds. ”

“ The city from the foothills as you look out upon it seems an island forest of tall towers, surrounded by a verdant plain.
"A wall 9350 meters in length, protected by a deep moat, surrounds the city. Every one hundred and sixty meters there is a tower forty meters high and fourteen meters broad. ”

“ Three rectangular towers rise to unequal heights above the roof, and, like the western porch, are bare and primitive, though they would be effective enough could one but get an ensemble view that would bring them into range. ”

“ The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines, for the battering rams pound their angles to pieces; but in the case of round towers they can do no harm, being engaged, as it were, in driving wedges to their centre. ”

“ The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. ”

“ To stand at the crossing and gaze upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view, is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap the p. ”

“ The moon now threw a faint light over their path, and, soon after, enabled them to distinguish some towers rising above the tops of the woods. ”

“ Many church towers would have to be placed one on the top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. ”

“ Every one, I suppose, feels the unfinished look of the towers; the eye craves for something or other more than there is, be it pinnacles, spires, or anything else. Now I once very carefully examined the tops of the towers in company with Mr. ”

“ And The Towers is vividly described for me by the single fact that I could not "nest" there.
I took several days to discover this, but the first impression of impermanence was truer than I knew. The feathers of the mind refused here to lie one way. They ruffled, pointed, and grew wild.
Luxurious furniture does not mean comfort; I might as well have tried to settle down in the sofa and armchair department of a big shop. My bedroom was easily managed ”

“ After a hundred years the son of the King then reigning, who was of another family from that of the sleeping Princess, was a-hunting on that side of the country, and he asked what those towers were which he saw in the middle of a great thick wood. ”

“ I am very sorry to say that I rejoiced when I once more perceived the towers of Windsor behind me. ”

“ It was not to Mount Olympus that our friend Bold betook himself. He had before now wandered round that lonely spot, thinking how grand a thing it was to write articles for the Jupiter; considering within himself whether by any stretch of the powers within him he could ever come to such distinction; wondering how Tom Towers would take any little humble offering of his talents; calculating that Tom Towers himself must have once had a beginning, have once doubted as to his own success. Towers could not have been born a writer in the Jupiter. ”