Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/410

396 apex sentinel of an equilateral triangle. When it has reconnoitred your position for a few minutes, it falls back into the centre of the line of spires, all drawn up in the order of review. Then they change fronts, wheel, advance, and retreat as you change your point of view; so that you have a stately steeple-chase enacted before you, and you feel constrained to stop and study the principles of these tactics, and the parties that perform them. And it will pay well any intelligent traveller to stop and go up into the town, and study the relationships and individual characters of these three remarkable spires and the churches which lift them up into the sky. Nowhere else in England can you find two such churches, standing locked in arms, as The Holy Trinity and St. Michael's, of Coventry. They seem to be twins in age, and to have grown up to their grand stature by the side of their infancy's cradle. They stand in the same churchyard, wrinkled and furrowed with their long centuries. No one has undertaken to prove or say which is the oldest. A soft mist of antiquity surrounds them, and legends of the first Henrys and Edwards and of Norman nobles hover around them like tattling rooks. Trinity stands a little higher on its foundation, but St. Michael's, with its feet planted lower, lifts up a higher spire, and the two are as graceful fingers as ever twin churches raised toward heaven,