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 reduces back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the
bulletins whereby the most base of civic mutinies finds current record
is that entitled, "Destruction 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." 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 forever
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 light-house; 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 enter into 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 that it was designed by Michel Angelo! 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! 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's "Commentaries," 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 goal of habitual excursions, the rendezvous, the
observatory, the favorite 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 homo 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 water-courses
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 the archæologist, who
seeks among the ruins of Art for trophies of a by-gone 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." An old
traveller, describing New-York amusements, tells us of a favorite 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."[F] 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 concliating 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 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 human bridge of courtesy or love; and that was a
graceful fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his
thoughts in "Letters 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 whose _rationale_ is 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. 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 water-course, to such
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 favorite 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, lends to it the spell of fame.
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; 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!
The history of Rome is written on her bridges. The Ponte Rotto is Art's
favorite 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 servatory 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, Lavator 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 forever 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 every vocation 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 goldsmith's 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 favorite 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 Londonbridge," 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; it was once covered with
houses; Peter the Dutchman's famous water-wheels plashed at its side;
from the dark street and projecting gables noted tavern-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 valor have
often consecrated these narrow defiles and exclusive means of advance
and retreat:--
"When the goodman mends his armor
And trims his helmet's plume,
When the good-wife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom,
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In 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 massive causeways 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 favorite 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 fireship 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 favorably compared with
the celebrated Rhine bridge of Julius Cæsar. When it is remembered,
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."[G]
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: King's Bridge was
a formidable barrier to the invasion of New York by land. 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 of science 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, and tubular
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 passed over the Strait of Menai by this
grand expedient established the superiority of this principle of
construction, and 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 boldly dexterous as culpably reckless. 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! Canova thought the Waterloo Bridge the
finest in Europe, and, by a strangely tragic coincidence, this noble and
costly structure is the favorite scene of suicidal despair, wherewith
the catastrophes of modern novels and the most pathetic of city lyrics
are indissolably 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; and our own Remington's bridge-enthusiasm
involves a pathetic story. At Cordova, the bridge over the Guadalquivir
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
so valued as a picturesque ruin symbolizes both Imperial and
Ecclesiastical rule. In striking contrast with the reminiscences of
valor, 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
Prince Albert, 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 two "briggs of Ayr," whose "imaginary conversations" he caught and
recorded, or that other bridge which 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 Camwood"; 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." To the meditative pedestrian, indeed, such places lure to
quietude; the genial Country Parson, whose "Recreations" we have
recently shared, unconsciously illustrates this, when 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 honor, had hung
wreaths of laurel upon the rude planks.
Fragments, as well as entire roadways and arches of natural bridges, are
more numerous in rocky, mountainous, and volcanic regions than is
generally supposed; the action of the water in excavating cliffs, the
segments of caverns, the, accidental shapes of geological formations,
often result in structures so adapted for the use and like the shape of
bridges as to appear of artificial origin. In the States of Alabama and
Kentucky, especially, we have notable instances of these remarkable
freaks of Nature: there is one in Walker County, of the former State,
which, as a local curiosity, is unsurpassed; and one in the romantic
County of Christian, in the latter State, makes a span of seventy feet
with an altitude of thirty; while the vicinity of the famous Alabaster
Mountain of Arkansas boasts a very curious and interesting formation of
this species. Two of these natural bridges are of such vast proportions
and symmetrical structure that they rank among the wonders of the world,
and have long been the goals of pilgrimage, the shrines of travel. Their
structure would hint the requisites, and their forms the lines of
beauty, desirable in architectural prototypes. Across Cedar Creek, in
Rockbridge County, Virginia, a beautiful and gigantic arch, thrown by
elemental forces and shaped by time, extends. It is a stratified arch,
whence you gaze down two hundred feet upon the flowing water; its sides
are rock, nearly perpendicular. Popular conjecture reasonably deems it
the fragmentary arch of an immense limestone cave; its loftiness imparts
an aspect of lightness, although at the centre it is nearly fifty feet
thick, and so massive is the whole that over it passes a public road, so
that by keeping in the middle one might cross unaware of the marvel. To
realize its height it must be viewed from beneath; from the side of the
creek it has a Gothic aspect; its immense walls, clad with forest-trees,
its dizzy elevation, buttress-like masses, and aërial symmetry make this
sublime arch one of those objects which impress the imagination with
grace and grandeur all the more impressive because the mysterious work
of Nature,--eloquent of the ages, and instinct with the latent forces of
the universe. Equally remarkable, but in a diverse style, is the Giant's
Causeway, whose innumerable black stone columns rise from two to four
hundred feet above the water's edge in the County of Antrim, on the
north coast of Ireland. These basaltic pillars are for the most part
pentagonal, whose five sides are closely united, not in one conglomerate
mass, but, articulated so aptly that to be traced the ball and socket
must be disjointed.
The effect of statuary upon bridges is memorable: the Imperial statues
which line that of Berlin form an impressive array; and whoever has seen
the figures on the Bridge of Sant' Angelo at Home, when illuminated on
a Carnival night, or the statues upon Santa Trinità at Florence, bathed
in moonlight, and their outline distinctly revealed against sky and
water, cannot but realize how harmoniously sculpture may illustrate and
heighten the architecture of the bridge. More quaint than appropriate is
pictorial embellishment; a beautiful Madonna or local saint placed
midway or at either end of a bridge, especially one of mediæval form and
fashion, seems appropriate; but elaborate painting, such as one sees at
Lucerne, strikes us as more curious than desirable. The bridge which
divides the town and crosses the Reuss is covered, yet most of the
pictures are weather-stained; as no vehicles are allowed,
foot-passengers can examine them at ease. They are in triangular frames,
ten feet apart, but few have any technical merit. One series illustrates
Swiss history; and the Kapellbrücke has the pictorial life of the Saint
of the town; while the Mile Bridge exhibits a quaint and rough copy of
the famous "Dance of Death."
In Switzerland what fearful ravines and foaming cascades do bridges
cross! sometimes so aërial, and overhanging such precipices, as to
justify to the imagination the name superstitiously bestowed on more
than one, of the Devil's Bridge; while from few is a more lovely effect
of near water seen than the "arrowy Rhone," as we gaze down upon its
"blue rushing" beneath the bridge at Geneva. Perhaps the varied
pictorial effects of bridges, at least in a city, are nowhere more
striking than at Venice, whose five hundred, with their mellow tint and
association with palatial architecture and streets of water, especially
when revealed by the soft and radiant hues of an Italian sunset, present
outlines, shapes, colors, and contrasts so harmonious and beautiful as
to warm and haunt the imagination while they charm the eye. It is
remarkable, as an artistic fact, how graciously these structures adapt
themselves to such diverse scenes,--equally, though variously,
picturesque amid the sturdy foliage and wild gorges of the Alps, the
bustle, fog, and mast-forest of the Thames, and the crystal atmosphere,
Byzantine edifices, and silent canals of Venice.
Whoever has truly felt the aërial perspective of Turner has attained a
delicate sense of the pictorial significance of the bridge; for, as we
look through his floating mists, we descry, amid Nature's most
evanescent phenomena, the span, the arch, the connecting lines or masses
whereby this familiar image seems to identify itself not less with
Nature than with Art. Among the drawings which Arctic voyagers have
brought home, many a bridge of ice, enormous and symmetrical, seems to
tempt adventurous feet and to reflect a like form of fleecy cloud-land;
daguerreotyped by the frost in miniature, the same structures may be
traced on the window-pane; printed on the fossil and the strata of rock,
in the veins of bark and the lips of shells, or floating in sunbeams, an
identical design appears; and, on a summer morning, as the eye carefully
roams over a lawn, how often do the most perfect little
suspension-bridges hang from spear to spear of herbage, their filmy span
embossed with glittering dew-drops!
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