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 Caesar, 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.
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