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.
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