"I stood upon a bridge and heard
The water rushing by,
And as I thought, to every word
The water made reply.
I looked into the deep river,
I looked so still and long,
Until I saw the elfin shades
Pass by in many a throng.
They came and went like starry dreams,
For ever moving on,
As darkness takes the starry beams
Unnoted till they're gone."
There is something in a bridge, and especially in an old one, which has
been time-worn and mossed into harmony with surrounding nature, which has
always seemed peculiarly poetical or strange to men. Hence so many
legends of devil's bridges, and it is rather amusing when we reflect how,
as Pontifex, he is thus identified with the head of the Church. Thus I
once, when attending law lectures in Heidelberg in 1847, heard Professor
Mittermaier say, that those who used the saying of "the divine right of
kings" as an argument reminded him of the peasants who assumed that every
old bridge was built by the devil. It is, however, simply the arch,
which in any form is always graceful, and the stream passing through it
like a living thing, which forms the artistic attraction or charm of such
structures. I have mentioned in my "Memoirs" that Ralph Waldo Emerson
was once impressed by a remark, the first time I met him, to the effect
that a vase in a room had the effect of a bridge in a landscape--at
least, he recalled it at once when I met him twenty years later.
The most distinguished bridge, from a legendary point of view, in Europe,
was that of Saint John Nepomuc in Prague--recently washed away owing to
stupid neglect; the government of the city probably not supporting, like
the king in the opera-bouffe of "Barbe Bleu," a commissioner of bridges.
The most picturesque work of the kind which I recall is that of the Ponte
Maddalena--also a devil's bridge--at the Bagni di Lucca. That Florence
is not wanting in legends for its bridges appears from the following: