In Caesar'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.
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