BRIDGES.

‘The lips, as Cumæ’s cavern close;The cheeks, with fast and sorrow thin;The rigid front, almost morose,But for the patient hope within;Declare a life whose course hath beenUnsullied still, though still severe,Which, through the wavering days of sin,Kept itself icy chaste and clear.’

National characters become, as it were, household gods through the sculptor’s portrait; the duplicates of Canova’s head of Napoleon seem as appropriate in thesalonsand shops of France, as the heads of Washington and Franklin in America, or the antique images of Scipio Africanus and Ceres in Sicily, and Wellington and Byron in London.

It is to us a source of noble delight, that with these permanent trophies of the sculptor’s art may now be mingled our national fame. Twenty years ago, the address in Murray’s Guide-Book,—Crawford, an American Sculptor, Piazza Barberini,—would have been unique; now that name is enrolled on the list of the world’s benefactors in the patrimony of Art. Greenough, by his pen, his presence, and his chisel, gave an impulse to taste andknowledge in sculpture and architecture not destined soon to pass away; no more eloquent and original advocate of the beautiful and the true in the higher social economies has blest our day; his Cherubs and Medora overflow with the poetry of form; his essays are a valuable legacy of philosophic thought. The Greek Slave of Powers was invariably surrounded by visitors at the London World’s Fair and the Manchester Exhibition. Story’s Cleopatra was the nucleus of charmed observation at Sydenham. The Pearl Diver of Paul Akers is his own most beautiful monument. Palmer has sent forth from his isolated studio at Albany a series of ideal busts, of a pure type of original and exquisite beauty; and many others might be named who have honourably illustrated an American claim to distinction in an art eminently republican in its perpetuation of national worth, and the identity of its highest achievements with social progress.

‘I stood on the bridge at midnight,As the clocks were striking the hour,And the moon rose over the city,Behind the dark church-tower.And like those waters rushingAmong the wooden piers,A flood of thoughts came o’er me,That filled my eyes with tears.’Longfellow.

Instinctively, Treason, in this vast land, aimed its first blow at the Genius of Communication,—the benign and potent means and method of American civilization and nationality. The great problem Watt and Fulton, Clinton and Morse, so gloriously solved, a barbaric necessity thus reduced back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the bulletins whereby the most base of civic mutinies found current record, is that entitledDestruction of the Bridges; and (melancholy contrast!) simultaneously we hear of constructive energy in the same direction, on the Italian peninsula,—an engineer having submitted to Victor Emmanuel proposals for throwing a bridge across the Straits of Messina, ‘binding Scylla to Charybdis, and thus clinching Italian unity with bonds of iron.’[46]Bonds of nationality,in more than a physical sense, indeed, are bridges; even cynical Heine found an endeared outlook to his native Rhine on the bastion of a familiar bridge. Tennyson makes one an essential feature of his English summer-picture, wherein for ever glows the sweet image of the ‘Gardener’s Daughter;’ and Bunyan found no better similitude for Christian’s passage from Time to Eternity than the ‘river where there is no bridge.’

The primitive need, the possible genius, the science, and the sentiment of a bridge, endear its aspect and associations beyond those of any other economical structure. There is, indeed, something genially picturesque about a mill, as Constable’s pencil and Tennyson’s muse have aptly demonstrated; there is an artistic miracle possible in a sculptured gate, as those of Ghiberti so elaborately evidence; science, poetry, and human enterprise consecrate a lighthouse; sacred feelings hallow a spire, and mediæval towers stand forth in noble relief against the sunset sky; but around none of these familiar objects cluster the same thoroughly human associations which make a bridge attractive to the sight and memory. In its most remote suggestion it typifies man’s primal relation to Nature, his first instinctive effort to circumvent or avail himself of her resources; indeed, he might take his hint of a bridge from Nature herself,—her fallen monarchs of the forest athwart a stream, ‘the testimony of the rocks,’ the curving shores, cavern roofs, and pendent branches, and the prismatic bow in the heavens, which a poet well calls ‘a bridge to tempt the angels down.’

A bridge of the simplest kind is often charmingly effective as a landscape-accessory; there is a short plank one in a glen of the White Mountains, which, seen through a vista of woodland, makes out the picture so aptly that it is sketched by every artist who haunts the region. What lines of grace are added to the night-view of a great city by the lights on the bridges! What subtile principles enterinto the building of such a bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! How venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it was erected in the fifteenth century,—and the Rialto, when we think of Shylock and Portia; and how signal an instance is it of the progressive application of a true principle in science, that the contrivance whereby the South Americans bridge the gorges of their mountains, by a pendulous causeway of twisted osiers and bamboo,—one of which, crossed by Humboldt, was a hundred and twenty feet long,—is identical with that which sustains the magnificent structure over the Niagara river! The chasms and streams thus spanned by a rope of seven strands have a fairy-like aspect. Artist and engineer alike delight in this feature of tropical scenery. In some cases the stone structures built by the Spaniards, and half destroyed by earthquakes, are repaired with bamboo, and often with an effective grace. In a bridge the arch is triumphal, both for practical and commemorative ends. Unknown to the Greeks and Egyptians, even the ancient Romans, it is said by modern architects, did not appreciate its true mechanical principle, but ascribed the marvellous strength thereof to the cement which kept intact their semicircle. In Cæsar’sCommentaries, the bridge transit and vigilance form no small part of military tactics,—boats and baskets serving the same purpose in ancient and modern warfare. The church of old originated and consecrated bridges; religion, royalty, and art celebrate their advent; the opening of Waterloo Bridge is the subject of one of the best pictures of a modern English painter; and Cockney visitors to the peerless bridge of Telford still ask the guide where the Queen stood at its inauguration. But it is when we turn from the historical and scientific to the familiar and personal that we realize the spontaneous interest attached to a bridge. It is as a feature of our native landscape, the goalof habitual excursions, the rendezvous, the observatory, the favourite haunt or transit, that it wins the gaze and the heart. There the musing angler sits content; there the echoes of the horse’s hoofs rouse to expectancy the dozing traveller; there the glad lover dreams, and the despairing wretch seeks a watery grave, and the song of the poet finds a response in the universal heart,—

‘How often, oh, how often,In the days that have gone by,Have I stood on that bridge at midnight,And gazed on the wave and sky!’

One of the most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate symbols. The fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary arch in an ancient city of the vanished home of thousands. Thus, by its necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the last relic of civilized life. The old explorers of our Western Continent record the savage expedients whereby watercourses were passed,—coils of grape-vine carried between the teeth of an aboriginal swimmer and attached to the opposite bank, a floating log, or, in shallow streams, a series of stepping-stones; and the most popular historian of England, when delineating to the eye of fancy the hour of her capital’s venerable decay, can find no more impressive illustration than to make a broken arch of London Bridge the observatory of the speculative reminiscent.

The bridge is, accordingly, of all economical inventions, that which is most inevitable to humanity, signalizing the first steps of man amid the solitude of Nature, and accompanying his progress through every stage of civic life; its crude form makes the wanderer’s heart beat in the lonely forest, as a sign of the vicinity or the track of his kind; and its massive remains excite the reverent curiosity of thearchæologist, who seeks among the ruins of Art for trophies of a bygone race. Few indications of Roman supremacy are more striking than the unexpected sight of one of those bridges of solid and symmetrical masonry which the traveller in Italy encounters, when emerging from a mountain-pass or a squalid town upon the ancient highway. The permanent method herein apparent suggests an energetic and pervasive race whose constructive instinct was imperial; such an evidence of their pathway over water is as suggestive of national power as the evanescent trail of the savage is of his casual domain. In the bridge, as in no other structure, use combines with beauty by an instinctive law; and the stone arch, more or less elaborate in detail, is as essential now to the function and the grace of a bridge, as when it was first thrown, invincible and harmonious, athwart the rivers Cæsar’s legions crossed.

As I stood on the scattered planks which afford a precarious foothold amid the rapids of St. Anthony, methought these frail bridges of hewn timber accorded with the reminiscence of the missionary pioneer who discovered and named the picturesque waters, more than an elaborate and ancient causeway. Even those long, inelegant structures which lead the pedestrian over our own Charles river, or the broad inlets of the adjacent bay, have their peculiar charm as the scene of many a gorgeous autumnal sunset and many a patient ‘constitutional’ walk. It is a homely but significant proverb, ‘Never find fault with the bridge that carries you safe over.’ What beautiful shadows graceful bridges cast, when the twilight deepens and the waves are calm! How mysteriously sleep the moonbeams there! What a suggestive vocation is a toll-keeper’s! Patriarchs in this calling will tell of methodical and eccentric characters known for years.

Bridges have their legends. There is one in Lombardy whence a jilted lover sprang with his faithless bride as she passed to church with her new lover; it is yet called the‘Bridge of the Betrothed.’ On the mountain range, near Serravazza, in Tuscany, is a natural bridge which unites two of the lofty peaks; narrow and aërial, it is believed by the peasantry to have miraculously formed itself to give foothold to the Madonna as she passed over the mountains, and it bears her name. An old traveller, describing New York amusements, tells us of a favourite ride from the city to the suburban country, and says,—‘In the way there is a bridge, about three miles distant, which you always pass as you return, called the ‘Kissing Bridge,’ where it is part of the etiquette to salute the lady who has put herself under your protection.’[47]A curious lawsuit was lately instituted by the proprietor of a menagerie who lost an elephant by a bridge giving way beneath his unaccustomed weight; the authorities protested against damages, as they never undertook to give safe passage to so large an animal.

The office of a bridge is prolific of metaphor, whereof an amusing instance is Boswell’s comparison of himself, when translating Paoli’s talk to Dr. Johnson, to a ‘narrow isthmus connecting two continents.’ It has been aptly said of Dante’s great poem, that, in the world of letters, it is a mediæval bridge over that vast chasm which divides classical from modern times. All conciliating authors bridge select severed intelligences, and even national feeling: as Irving’s writings brought more near to each other the alienated sympathies of England and America, and Carlyle made a trysting-place for British and German thought; as Sydney Smith’s talk threw a suspension-bridge from Conservative to Reformer, and Lord Bacon’s (in the hour of bitter alienation between Crown and Commons) ‘reconciling genius spanned the dividing stream of party.’

How quaint, yet effective, Jean Paul’s illustration of analienated state of human feeling, ‘the drawbridge of countenances, whereupon once the two souls met, stood suddenly raised, high in air.’ Nor less significant is a modern historian’s definition of an Englishman, as ‘an island surrounded by a misty and tumultuous sea of prejudices and hatreds, generally unapproachable, and at all timesutterly repudiative of a bridge.’ Pontifex Maximus has long ceased to wear the great spiritual title whose unchallenged attribute was to bridge the chasm between earth and heaven. What humour may be evolved from a nose-bridge,Punchin his dealings with the great Duke, and Sterne in his record of Tristram Shandy’s infancy, have notably chronicled; while the infinite delicacy of tension in the bridge of Paganini’s violin, indicates the relation thereof to exquisite gradations of sound. ‘The Mohammedans,’ says Scott, ‘have a fanciful idea that the believer, in his passage to Paradise, is under the necessity of passing barefoot over a bridge composed of red-hot iron plates. All the pieces of paper which the Moslem has preserved during his life, lest some holy thing being written upon them might be profaned, arrange themselves between his feet and the burning metal, and so save him from injury.’ In the ‘Vision’ of Mirza, a bridge is typical of human life. That was a ludicrous incident related of poor, obstinate, crazy George the Third,—that encountering some boys near a bridge early one morning, he asked them what bridge it was. ‘The Bridge of Kew,’ they replied; whereupon the king proposed and gave three vociferous cheers for the Bridge of Kew, as a newly-discovered wonder. Amusing, too, was the warm dispute of the two errant lake poets whether a certain acutely-angular bridge in the Alps was called great A from its resemblance to that letter, or as the first of its kind.

How isolated and bewildered are villagers, when, after a tempest, the news spreads that a freshet has carried away the bridge! Every time we shake hands we make a humanbridge of courtesy or love; and that was a graceful fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his thoughts inLetters from under a Bridge. With an eye and an ear for Nature’s poetry, the gleam of lamps from a bridge, the figures that pass and repass thereon, the rush and the lull of waters beneath, the perspective of the arch, the weather-stains on the parapet, the sunshine and the cloud-shadows around, are phases and sounds fraught with meaning and mystery.

It is an acknowledged truth in the philosophy of Art, that Beauty is the handmaid of Use; and as the grace of the swan and the horse results from a conformation whoserationaleis movement, so the pillar that supports the roof, and the arch that spans the current, by their serviceable fitness, wed grace of form to wise utility. The laws of architecture illustrate this principle copiously; but in no single and familiar product of human skill is it more striking than in bridges; if lightness, symmetry, elegance, proportion, charm the ideal sense, not less are the economy and adaptation of the structure impressive to the eye of science. Perhaps the ideas of use and beauty, of convenience and taste, in no instance coalesce more obviously; and therefore, of all human inventions, the bridge lends the most undisputed charm to the landscape. It is one of those symbols of humanity which spring from and are not grafted upon Nature; it proclaims her affinity with man, and links her spontaneous benefits with his invention and his needs; it seems to celebrate the stream over which it rises, and to wed the wayward waters to the order and the mystery of life. There is no hint of superfluity or impertinence in a bridge; it blends with the wildest and the most cultivated scene with singular aptitude, and is a feature of both rural and metropolitan landscape that strikes the mind as essential. A striking confirmation of this idea offers itself in a recent critic’s definition of a classic style of writing: ‘A bridge,’ he says, ‘completesriver landscape; itstiffensthe scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure style in literary art.’[48]The most usual form has its counterpart in those rocky arches which flood and fire have excavated or penned up in many picturesque regions—the segments of caverns or the ribs of strata,—so that, without the instinctive suggestion of the mind itself, Nature furnishes complete models of a bridge whereon neither Art nor Science can improve. Herein the most advanced and the most rude peoples own a common skill; bridges, of some kind, and all adapted to their respective countries, being the familiar invention of savage necessity and architectural genius. The explorer finds them in Africa as well as the artist in Rome; swung, like huge hammocks of ox-hide, over the rapid streams of South America; spanning in fragile cane-platforms the gorges of the Andes; crossing vast chasms of the Alleghanies with the slender iron viaduct of the American railways; and jutting, a crumbling segment of the ancient world, over the yellow Tiber: as familiar on the Chinese tea-caddy as on Canaletto’s canvas; as traditional a local feature of London as of Florence; as significant of the onward march of civilization in Wales to-day as in Liguria during the middle ages. Where men dwell and wander, and water flows, these beautiful and enduring, or curious and casual expedients are found, as memorable triumphs of architecture, crowned with historical associations, or as primitive inventions that unconsciously mark the first faltering steps of humanity in the course of empire; for, on this continent, where the French missionary crossed the narrow log supported by his Indian convert in the midst of a wilderness, massive stone arches shadow broad streams that flow through populous cities; and the history of civilization may be traced from the loose stones whereon the lone settler fords the watercourse, tosuch grand, graceful, and permanent monuments of human prosperity as the elaborate and ancient stone bridges of European capitals.

When we look forth upon a grand or lovely scene of Nature—mountain, river, meadow, and forest,—what a fine central object, what an harmonious artificial feature of the picture, is a bridge, whether rustic and simple, a mere rude passage-way over a brook, or a curve of gray stone throwing broad shadows upon the bright surface of a river! Nor less effective is the same object amid the crowded walls, spires, streets, and chimney-stacks of a city. There the bridge is the least conventional structure, the suggestive point, the favourite locality; it seems to reunite the working-day world with the freedom of Nature; it is, perhaps, the one spot in the dense array of edifices and thoroughfares which ‘gives us pause.’ There, if anywhere, our gaze and our feet linger; people have a relief against the sky, as they pass over it; artists look patiently thither; lovers, the sad, the humorous, and the meditative, stop there to observe and to muse; they lean over the parapet and watch the flowing tide; they look thence around as from a pleasant vantage-ground. The bridge, in populous old towns, is the rendezvous, the familiar landmark, the traditional nucleus of the place, and perhaps the only picturesque framework in all those marts and homes, more free, open, and suggestive of a common lot than temple, square, or palace; for there pass and repass noble and peasant, regal equipage and humble caravan; children plead to stay, and veterans moralize there; the privileged beggar finds a standing-place for charity to bless; a shrine hallows or a sentry guards, history consecrates or art glorifies; and trade, pleasure, or battle, perchance, lend to it the spell of fame. The dearest associations of a life are described in one of Jean Ingelow’s most elaborate poems, as revolving around and identified with ‘Four Bridges:’—

‘Our brattling river tumbles through the one;The second spans a shallow, weedy brook;Beneath the others, and beneath the sun,Lie two long stilly pools, and on their breastsPicture their wooden piles, encased in swallows’ nests.And round about them grows a fringe of weeds,And then a floating crown of lily flowers,And yet within small silver-budded weeds;But each clear centre evermore embowersA deeper sky, where stooping, you may seeThe little minnows twirling restlessly.’

In the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, the picturesque bridge over the Don, with its adjacent rocks, trees, and deep, dark stream, is known as the ‘brig of Balgownie.’ Thomas the Rhymer uttered many prophecies about ‘Balgownie’s brig black wa’;’ and it figures among the scenes of Byron’s boyhood. Let any one recall his sojourn in a foreign city, and conjure to his mind’s eye the scenes, and prominent to his fancy, distinct to his memory, will be the bridge. He will think of Florence as intersected by the Arno, and with the very name of that river reappears the peerless grace of the Ponte Santa Trinità with its moss-grown escutcheons and aërial curves. He will recall the Pont du Gard with the vicinage of Nismes; the Pont Neuf, at Paris, with its soldiers and priests, its boot-blacks and grisettes, the gay streets on one side, and the studious quarter on the other, typifies and concentrates for him the associations of the French capital; and what a complete symbol of Venice—its canals, its marbles, its mysterious polity, its romance of glory and woe—is a good photograph of the Bridge of Sighs! Her history is, indeed, singularly identified with bridges. One, as her exchange, is permanently associated with the palmiest days of mediæval commerce; another with the darker records of her criminal law; while on one of her bridges, Sarpi, the ‘terrible friar’ Paolo was waylaid and nearly killed by Papal assassins, whence dates the most efficient protest against ecclesiastical tyranny.

The history of Rome is written on her bridges. The Ponte Rotto is Art’s favourite trophy of her decay; two-thirds of it has disappeared; and the last Pope has ineffectively repaired it, by a platform sustained by iron wire: yet who that has stood thereon in the sunset, and looked from the dome of St. Peter’s to the islands projected at that hour so distinctly from the river’s surface, glanced along the flushed dwellings upon its bank, with their intervals of green terraces; or gazed, in the other direction, upon the Cloaca of Tarquin, Vesta’s dome, and the Aventine Hill, with its palaces, convents, vineyards, and gardens, has not felt that the Ponte Rotto was the most suggestive observatory in the Eternal City? The Ponte Molle brings back Constantine and his vision of the Cross; and the statues on Sant’ Angelo mutely attest the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical eras.

England boasts no monument of her modern victories so impressive as the bridge named for the most memorable of them. The best view of Prague and its people is from the long series of stone arches which span the Moldau. The solitude and serenity of genius are rarely better realized than by musing of Klopstock and Gessner, Lavater and Zimmermann, on the Bridge of Rapperschwyl on the Lake of Zurich, where they dwelt and wrote or died. From the Bridge of St. Martin we have the first view of Mont Blanc. The Suspension Bridge at Niagara is an artificial wonder as great, in its degree, as the natural miracle of the mighty cataract which thunders for ever at its side; while no triumph of inventive economy could more aptly lead the imaginative stranger into the picturesque beauties of Wales than the extraordinary tubular bridge across the Menai Strait. The aqueduct-bridge at Lisbon, the long causeway over Cayuga Lake in our own country, and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans, are memorable in every traveller’s retrospect.

But the economical and the artistic interest of bridges is often surpassed by their historical suggestions, almost everyvocation and sentiment of humanity being intimately associated therewith. The Rialto at Venice and the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, are identified with the financial enterprise of the one city and the goldsmiths’ skill of the other: one was long the Exchange of the ‘City of the Sea,’ and still revives the image of Shylock and the rendezvous of Antonio; while the other continues to represent mediæval trade in the quaint little shops of jewellers and lapidaries. One of the characteristic religious orders of that era is identified with the ancient bridge which crosses the Rhone at Avignon, erected by the ‘Brethren of the Bridge,’ a fraternity instituted in an age of anarchy expressly to protect travellers from the bandits, whose favourite place of attack was at the passage of rivers. The builder of the old London Bridge, Peter Colechurch, is believed to have been attached to this same order; he died in 1176, and was buried in a crypt of the little chapel on the second pier, according to the habit of the fraternity. For many years a market was held on this bridge; it was often the scene of war; it stayed the progress of Canute’s fleet; at one time destroyed by fire, and at another carried away by ice; half ruined in one era by the bastard Faulconbridge, and at another the watchword of civil war, when the cry resounded, ‘Cade hath gotten London Bridge!’ and Wat Tyler’s rebels convened there. Elizabeth and her peerless courtiers have floated, in luxurious barges and splendid attire, by its old piers, and the heads of traitors rotted in the sun upon its venerable battlements. Only sixty years ago a portion of the original structure remained;[49]it was once covered with houses; Peter the Dutchman’s famous water-wheels plashed at its side; from the dark street and projected gables notedtavern-signs vibrated in the wind. The exclusive thoroughfare from the city to Kent and Surrey, what ceremonial and scenes has it not witnessed,—royal entrances and greetings, rites under the low brown arches of the old chapel, revelry in the convenient hostels, traffic in the crowded mart, chimes from the quaint belfry, the tragic triumph of vindictive law in the gory heads upon spikes! The veritable and minute history of London Bridge would illustrate the civic and social annals of England; and romance could scarce invent a more effective background for the varied scenes and personages such a chronicle would exhibit than the dim local perspective, when, ere any bridge stood there, the ferryman’s daughter founded, with the tolls, a House of Sisters, subsequently transformed into a college of priests. By a law of Nature, thus do the elements of civilization cluster around the place of transit; thus do the courses of the water indicate the direction and nucleus of emigration,—from the vast lakes and mighty rivers of America, whereby an immense continent is made available to human intercourse, and therefore to material unity, to the point where the Thames was earliest crossed and spanned. More special historical and social facts may be found attached to every old bridge. In war, especially, heroic achievement and desperate valour have often consecrated these narrow defiles and exclusive means of advance and retreat:—

‘When the goodman mends his armour,And trims his helmet’s plume,When the goodwife’s shuttle merrilyGoes flashing through the loom,With weeping and with laughterStill is the story told,How well Horatius kept the bridgeIn the good old days of old.’

The bridge of Darius spanned the Bosphorus,—of Xerxes, the Hellespont,—of Cæsar, the Rhine,—and of Trajan, the Danube; while the victorious march of Napoleon has left few traces so unexceptionably memorable as the massivecauseways of the Simplon. Cicero arrested the bearer of letters to Catiline on the Pons Milonis, built in the time of Sylla on the ancient Via Flaminia; and by virtue of the blazing cross which he saw in the sky from the Ponte Molle the Christian emperor Constantine conquered Maxentius. The Pont du Gard near Nismes, and the St. Esprit near Lyons, were originally of Roman construction. During the war of freedom, so admirably described by our countryman, whereby rose the Dutch Republic, the Huguenots, at the siege of Valenciennes, we are told, ‘made forays upon the monasteries for the purpose of procuring supplies, and the broken statues of the dismantled churches were used to build a bridge across an arm of the river, which was called, in derision, the Bridge of Idols.’

But a more memorable historical bridge is admirably described in another military episode of this favourite historian,—that which Alexander of Parma built across the Scheldt, whereby Antwerp was finally won for Philip of Spain. Its construction was a miracle of science and courage; and it became the scene of one of the most terrible tragedies and the most fantastic festivals which signalize the history of that age, and illustrate the extraordinary and momentous struggle for religious liberty in the Netherlands. Its piers extended five hundred feet into the stream,—connected with the shore by boats, defended by palisades, fortified parapets, and spiked rafts; cleft and partially destroyed by the volcanic fire-ship of Gianebelli, a Mantuan chemist and engineer, whereby a thousand of the best troops of the Spanish army were instantly killed, and their brave chief stunned,—when the hour of victory came to the besiegers, it was the scene of a floral procession and Arcadian banquet, and ‘the whole extent of its surface from the Flemish to the Brabant shore’ was alive with ‘war-bronzed figures crowned with flowers.’ ‘This magnificent undertaking has been favourably compared with the celebrated Rhine bridge of Julius Cæsar. When it isremembered, however, that the Roman work was performed in summer, across a river only half as broad as the Scheldt, free from the disturbing action of the tides, and flowing through an unresisting country, while the whole character of the structure, intended only to serve for the single passage of an army, was far inferior to the massive solidity of Parma’s bridge, it seems not unreasonable to assign the superiority to the general who had surmounted all the obstacles of a northern winter, vehement ebb and flow from the sea, and enterprising and desperate enemies at every point.’[50]

It was at the bridge of Pinos, where the Moors and Christians had so fiercely battled, that Columbus, after pleading his cause in vain at the court, hastening away with despondent steps, was overtaken by the queen’s messenger; recalled, and provided with the substantial aid that led to his momentous discovery. It was in a pavilion in the middle of the bridge across the Seine at Montereau, that the Dauphin, afterwards Charles the Seventh, invited the Duke of Burgundy to meet him in colloquy; and there the latter met his death. The Bridge of Lodi is one of the great landmarks of Napoleon’s career; and the Bridge of Concord no insignificant landmark of the American Revolutionary War. Over the Melos at Smyrna is a bridge which is a rendezvous for camels, and has been justly called ‘the central point of the commerce of Asia Minor.’

We have a memorable illustration of the historic interest of bridges, in the elaborate annals of the Pont Neuf.[51]Although in importance it has long since been superseded by other elegant causeways, for centuries it was the centre of Paris life,—of the trade and pastime, of the scandal and the violences, of the shows andémeutes, so that the record of what occurred there is an epitome of political and socialhistory. It was the rendezvous of dog-clippers and ballad-singers, ofbraviand gallants, of the quack and the courtezan, of student, soldier, artist, and gossip. ‘The heart of Paris beat there,’ says the historian of the Pont Neuf, ‘from the seventeenth century;’ the statue of Henry IV. alone made it the nucleus of political associations; it was alike the scene of Cellini’s adventure and Sterne’s sentiment. Catherine de Medicis laid its first stone. Henry IV. completed it; guillotines,cafés, and altars have signalized its extremities or parapets. La Fronde was there inaugurated; there the discharge of cannon proclaimed the flight of the king in ’91; its pavement was bloody with the massacres of September; the first Napoleon there first tried his hand against the revolution; it was the scene of an Englishman’s famous bet and a parrot’s famous lingo. Huguenot, royalist, priest, executioner,gamin, assassin, thief, dandy, nun, hero, and actress,—procession, tryst, ambush, faction, and farce,—murder, song,bon-mot, watchword,—the tragic, the holy, and the hopeless in life, alternate in the story of the Pont Neuf. The Countess du Barri, as a child, ‘the pretty little angel,’ was a vendor there; and an old epigram identified her career with bridges,—her birth with the Pont au Choux, her childhood with the Pont Neuf, her triumph with the Pont Royale, and her end with the Pont aux Dames.

Even the fragile bridges of our own country during the Revolution, have an historical importance in the story of war. The ‘Great Bridge’ across the Elizabeth river, nine miles from Norfolk in Virginia; the floating bridge at Ticonderoga; that which spanned Stony Brook in New Jersey; and many others, are identified with strife or stratagem. What an effective object in the distant landscape, to thehabituéof the Central Park in New York, is the lofty bridge whereby the Croton aqueduct crosses the Harlaem river, with its fifteen arches, its fourteen hundred feet of length, and its span of nearly a thousand! How few of the multitude to whom King’s Bridge is a daily goal ortransit, are cognizant of its historical associations; yet the records of Manhattan Island declare that in 1692 ‘His Excellency the Governor, out of great favour and good to the city,’ proposed the building of this bridge, and soon ordered that ‘if Frederick Phillipse will undertake the same, he shall have the preference of their Majesties’ grant (5th of King William and 3rd of Queen Mary), which was subsequently confirmed to the lord of the manor of Phillipsburgh;’ whereon was born and lived Washington’s first love—the beautiful Mary Phillipse. Here was the barrier of the British, when they occupied New York Island in the Revolution; while as far north as the Croton river extended the neutral ground, the scene of Cooper’s first American romance, the heroine of which is this same fair but unresponsive enslaver of our peerless chief’s young affections. Here, in ’75, Congress ordered a post established to protect New York by land; two years later occurred the sanguinary fight between the Continentals under Heath and the Hessians under Knyphausen. The next year Cornwallis fixed his command at the same border causeway; and in ’81, when our army came near the spot to give the French officers a view of the outposts, a brisk skirmish ensued, and a number of our men were killed at long shot. King’s Bridge was long the rendezvous of freebooters in those unsettled times, and the rallying point of the Cow-boys. Beautifully situated at the confluence of the Hudson and Harlaem rivers, surrounded by high rolling hills, then thickly wooded and crowned with forts, the region was originally selected as the site of New Amsterdam, on account of its secure position. When Manhattan Island was abandoned by the British in ’76, Washington occupied King’s Bridge as his head-quarters. Indeed, from Trenton to Lodi, military annals have few more fierce conflicts than those wherein the bridge of the battle-ground is disputed; to cross one is often a declaration of war, and Rubicons abound in history.

There is probably no single problem, wherein the laws ofscience and mechanical skill combine, which has so won the attention and challenged the powers of inventive minds as the construction of bridges. The various exigencies to be met, the possible triumphs to be achieved, the experiments as to form, material, security, and grace, have been prolific causes of inspiration and disappointment. In this branch of economy, the mechanic and the mathematician fairly meet; and it requires a rare union of ability in both vocations to arrive at original results in this sphere. To invent a bridge, through the application of a scientific principle by a novel method, is one of those projects which seem to fascinate philosophical minds; in few have theory and practice been more completely tested; and the history of bridges, scientifically written, would exhibit as remarkable conflicts of opinion, trials of inventive skill, decision of character, genius, folly, and fame, as any other chapter in the annals of progress. How to unite security with the least inconvenience, permanence with availability, strength with beauty,—how to adapt the structure to the location, climate, use, and risks,—are questions which often invoke all the science and skill of the architect, and which have increased in difficulty with the advance of other resources and requisitions of civilization. Whether a bridge is to cross a brook, a river, a strait, an inlet, an arm of the sea, a canal, or a valley, are so many diverse contingencies which modify the calculations and plans of the engineer. Here liability to sudden freshets, there to overwhelming tides, now to the enormous weight of railway-trains, and again to the corrosive influence of the elements, must be taken into consideration; the navigation of waters, the exigencies of war, the needs of a population, the respective uses of viaduct, aqueduct, and roadway, have often to be included in the problem. These considerations influence not only the method of construction, but the form adopted and the material, and have given birth to bridges of wood, brick, stone, iron, wire, and chain,—to bridges supported by piers, to floating, suspension, andtubular structures, many of which are among the remarkable trophies of modern science and the noblest fruits of the arts of peace. Railways have created an entirely new species of bridge, to enable a train to intersect a road, to cross canals in slanting directions, to turn amid jagged precipices, and to cross arms of the sea at a sufficient elevation not to interfere with the passage of ships,—objects not to be accomplished by suspension-bridges because of their oscillation, nor girder for lack of support, the desiderata being extensive span with rigid strength, so triumphantly realized in the tubular bridge. The day when the great Holyrood train, passing over the Strait of Menai by this grand expedient, established the superiority of this principle of construction, became a memorable occasion in the annals of mechanical science, and immortalized the name of Stephenson.

We find great national significance in the history of bridges in different countries. Their costly and substantial grandeur in Britain accords with the solid qualities of the race, and their elegance on the Continent with the pervasive influence of art in Europe. It is a curious illustration of the inferior economical and high intellectual development of Greece, that the ‘Athenians waded, when their temples were the most perfect models of architecture;’ and equally an evidence of the practical energy of the old Romans, that their stone bridges often remain to this hour intact. Our own incomplete civilization is manifest in the marvellous number of bridges that annually break down, from negligent or unscientific construction; while the indomitable enterprise of the people is no less apparent in some of the longest, loftiest, most wonderfully constructed and sustained bridges in the world. We have only to cross the Suspension Bridge at Niagara, or gaze up to its aërial tracery from the river, or look forth upon wooded ravines and down precipitous and umbrageous glens from the Erie railway, to feel that in this, as in all other branches of mechanical enterprise, our nation is as boldlydexterous as culpably reckless. In no other country would so hazardous an experiment have been ventured as that of an engineer on one of the most frequented lines of railroad in the land, who, finding the bridge he was approaching on fire, bade the passengers keep their seats, and dashed boldly through the flames ere the main arch gave way! ‘The vast majority of bridges in this country,’ says a recent writer, ‘whether for railroads or for ordinary horse-travel, have these elemental points:—1. Fragility. 2. Unendurably hideous ugliness. 3. Great aptitude for catching fire. They are all built of wood, and must be constantly patched and mended, and will rot away in a very few years. They are enormous blots on the landscape, stretching as they do like long unpainted boxes across the stream; like huge Saurian monsters with ever-open jaws into which you rush, or walk, or drive, and are gobbled up from all sight or sense of beauty. The dry timber of which they are built will catch fire from the mere spark of a locomotive, as in the case a few years ago of that hideous bridge which had so long insulted the Hudson river at Troy; and which was not only burned itself, but spread the destroying flame to the best part of the town. These bridges deface all the valleys of our land. The Housatonic, the Mohawk, the Lehigh, the hundreds of small yet beautiful rivers which so delightfully diversify our country, one and all suffer by the vile wooden-bridge system which has nothing at all to plead in extenuation of its tasteless, expensive existence. Every bridge in this country should be deprived of its heavy roof; and if the exigencies of engineering required side-walls, they should be plentifully perforated with open spaces. The more recent railroad bridges are fortunately open bridges, or “viaducts,” as it is fashionable to call them, and the traveller, as in the case of the Starucca viaduct on the Erie road, can both admire the engineering skill and enjoy the scenery. The Connecticut valley is terribly disfigured by these bridges; and a travellerfrom New Haven to Memphremagog will be thoroughly impressed with this fact, which is the only drawback to the pleasure of the route.’ As an instance of ingenuity in this sphere, the bridge which crosses the Potomac creek, near Washington, deserves notice. The hollow iron arches which support this bridge also serve as conduits to the aqueduct which supplies the city with water.

Amid the mass of prosaic structures in London, what a grand exception to the architectural monotony are her bridges! How effectually they have promoted her suburban growth! ‘The English,’ wrote Rose, from Italy, ‘are Hottentots in architecture except that of bridges.’ Canova thought the Waterloo Bridge the finest in Europe; and, by a strangely-tragic coincidence, this noble and costly structure is the favourite scene of suicidal despair, wherewith the catastrophes of modern novels and the most pathetic of city lyrics are indissolubly associated. Westminster Bridge is as truly the Swiss Laboyle’s monument of architectural genius, fortitude, and patience, as St. Paul’s is that of Wren; there Crabbe, with his poems in his pocket, walked to and fro in a flutter of suspense the morning before his fortunate application to Burke; and our own Remington’s bridge-enthusiasm involves a pathetic story. At Cordova, the bridge over the Guadalquiver is a grand relic of Moorish supremacy. The oldest bridge in England is that of Croyland in Lincolnshire; the largest crosses the Trent in Staffordshire. Tom Paine designed a cast-iron bridge, but the speculation failed, and the materials were subsequently used in the beautiful bridge over the river Wear, in Durham county. There is a segment of a circle six hundred feet in diameter in Palmer’s bridge which spans our own Piscataqua. It is said that the first edifice of the kind which the Romans built of stone was the Ponte Rotto—begun by the Censor Fulvius, and finished by Scipio Africanus and Lucius Mummius. Popes Julius III. and Gregory XIV. repaired it; so that the fragment now sovalued as a picturesque ruin symbolizes both Imperial and Ecclesiastical rule. In striking contrast with the reminiscences of valour hinted by ancient Roman bridges, are the ostentatious Papal inscriptions which everywhere in the States of the Church, in elaborate Latin, announce that this Pontiff built, or that Pontiff repaired, these structures.

The mediæval castle-moat and drawbridge have, indeed, been transferred from the actual world to that of fiction, history, and art, except where preserved as memorials of antiquity; but the civil importance which from the dawn of civilization attached to the bridge is as patent to-day as when a Roman emperor, a feudal lord, or a monastic procession went forth to celebrate or consecrate its advent or completion; in evidence whereof, we have the appropriate function which made permanently memorable the late visit of Victoria’s son to her American realms, in his inauguration of the magnificent bridge bearing her name, which is thrown across the St. Lawrence for a distance of only sixty yards less than two English miles,—the greatest tubular bridge in the world. When the young prince, amid the cheers of a multitude and the grand cadence of the national anthem, finished the Victoria Bridge by giving three blows with a mallet to the last rivet in the central tube, he celebrated one of the oldest, though vastly advanced, triumphs of the arts of peace, which ally the rights of the people and the good of human society to the representatives of law and polity.

One may recoil with a painful sense of material incongruity, as did Hawthorne, when contemplating the noisome suburban street where Burns lived; but all the humane and poetical associations connected with the long struggle sustained by him, of ‘the highest in man’s soul against the lowest in man’s destiny,’ recur in sight of the Bridge of Doon, and the ‘Twa Brigs of Ayr,’ whose ‘imaginary conversations’ he caught and recorded; or that other bridgewhich spans a glen on the Auchinleck estate, where the rustic bard first saw the Lass of Ballochmyle. The tender admiration which embalms the name of Keats is also blent with the idea of a bridge. The poem which commences his earliest published volume was suggested, according to Milnes, as he ‘loitered by the gate that leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath to the field by Caenwood;’ and the young poet told his friend Clarke that the sweet passage, ‘Awhile upon some bending planks,’ came to him as he hung ‘over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton.’ One of Wordsworth’s finest sonnets was composed on Westminster Bridge. To the meditative pedestrian, indeed, such places lure to quietude; the genial Country Parson, whoseRecreationswe have recently shared, unconsciously illustrates this, as he speaks of the privilege men like him enjoy, when free ‘to saunter forth with a delightful sense of leisure, and know that nothing will go wrong, although he should sit down on the mossy parapet of the little one-arched bridge that spans the brawling mountain-stream.’ On that Indian-summer day when Irving was buried, no object of the familiar landscape, through which, without formality, and in quiet grief, so many of the renowned and the humble followed his remains from the village church to the rural graveyard, wore so pensive a fitness to the eye as the simple bridge over Sleepy-Hollow Creek, near to which Ichabod Crane encountered the headless horseman,—not only as typical of his genius, which thus gave a local charm to the scene, but because the country-people, in their heartfelt wish to do him honour, had hung wreaths of laurel upon the rude planks. There are few places in Europe where the picturesque and historical associations of a bridge more vividly impress the spectator than Sorrento; divided from the main land by a gorge two hundred feet deep and fifty wide, the chasm is spanned by a bridge which rests on double arches, built by the Romans; itis the popular rendezvous, and, beheld on coming from some adjacent orange-garden, resembles a picture,—the men with their crimson or brown caps, and the women with jetty hair and eyes and enormous earrings, cluster there in the centre of the most exquisite scenery. There is a bridge across the Adige, at Verona, which used to be opened but once a year, on account of the risk of injury—its span being prodigious; it was long called the ‘Holiday Bridge.’ In Paris the change in the names of bridges is historically significant: in 1817 ‘the bridge of Austerlitz abdicated its name,’ and became the bridge of the Jardin des Plantes. The lofty bridge of Carignano, at Genoa, owes its existence to a quarrel between two noblemen; and it is a favourite sacrificial spot to suicides who have repeatedly thrown themselves therefrom headlong into the Strada Servi.

‘The Baltimore and Ohio railroad company lose two of their admirable bridges: one at Fairmount, over the Monongahela river, and the famous one over the Cheat river,’ wrote a late reporter from the scene of war in Virginia. ‘The latter was one of the most beautiful structures in the United States, and, being placed amid scenery of unsurpassed grandeur, it had already become a classic spot in the guide-book of American art. It was vandalism fit for ingrates and traitors of the lowest type to destroy what was at once so beautiful and useful a monument of taste and science.’

Another fine landscape effect produced by a bridge is at Spoleto, in the Roman States; the ten brick arches that so picturesquely span the romantic valley, have carried the water for centuries into the old city. The magnificent bridge by which Madrid is approached, is a grand feature in the adjacent landscape; and its striking photograph a noble souvenir of the Spanish capital. The most awful bridge imagination ever created is that described by Milton, whereby Satan’s ‘sea should find a shore:’—

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