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 aerial 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!
* * * * *
INTERNAL STRUCTURE AND PROGRESSION OF THE GLACIER.
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