Chapter VI: Part 6

How well it is understood that we are not to speak the truth, but only good, of the dead! How melancholy it is, that _lying_ has come to be so common an epithet for the gravestones we set over their dust! How few obituaries characterize those for whom they are written, or are distinguishable from each other in the terms of their funeral celebrations of departed virtue! How refreshing, as rare, is any of the veritable description which implies real lamentation! But what a suspicion falls on the mourning in whose loquacity we cannot detect one natural tone! As if that last messenger, who strips off all delusions and appearances, should be pursued and affronted with the mockery of our pretence, and we could circumvent the angel of judgment with the sentence of our fond wishes and the affectation of our groundless claims! As if the disembodied, in the light of truth, by which they are surrounded and pierced, could be pleased with our make-believe, or tolerate the folly of our factitious phrase! With what sadness their purged eyes must follow the pens inditing their epitaphs, and the sculptors' chisels making the commonplaces of fulsome commendation permanent on their tombs! What vanity to their nicer ears must be the sonorous and declamatory orator's breath! Let us not offend them so. They will take it for the insult of perfunctory honor, not for the sympathy it assumes to be. _Nothing but good of the dead_, do you say? _Nothing but truth of the dead_, we answer. _Do not disturb their bones; let them rest easy at last_, is the commentary on all keen criticism of those who have played important parts in life, and whose influence has perhaps been a curse. No, we reply, their bones will rest easier, and their benedictions come to us surer, for our unaffected plain-dealing. The trick of flattery may succeed with the living. Those still in this world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!

But _private conversation_ is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth, trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public sentiment. Such a paper as the London "Times," having nothing higher than avaricious commerce and national pride to consult, in a conspicuous centre of affairs has thus become the great weathercock of the world, splendidly gilded, lifted very high in the air, but, like some other stupid chanticleers, crowing at false signals of the dawn, and well called the "Times," as in its columns nothing eternal was ever evinced. Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility, blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of our private word. Through what manifold phases _a good conversationist_ has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in Paul it never did, the fundamental consistency of principle which is the chief sign of spiritual life. The degree of elevation in the scale of being is marked by the approximation of the sight to a focus of unity. But, judging from the pictures they give us of their interior states, we might think many of our rational companions as myriad-eyed as naturalists tell us are some insects. Behold the wondrous transformation undergone by those very looks and features that give the natural language, as sentiments contrary to each other are successively presented, and Republican or Democrat, Pro-Slavery man or Abolitionist, walks up! In truth, a man at once kindly and ingenuous can hardly help in most assemblies coming continually to grief. He knows not what to do, to be at once frank and polite. The transverse beams of the cross on which he is crucified are made of the sincerity and amiability which in no company can he quite reconcile. Happy is he who has discovered beneath all pleasant humors the unity at bottom of candor with goodness, in an Apostle's clause, "speaking the truth in love"! No rare and beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when the _encore_ took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in great cathedrals, and our lowest whispers like tones caught from angelic harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough. The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact, does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing, minding others' business, interfering with their relations, impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand, and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such _discrete_ sentences--if we may use rhetorically a musical word--from your lips afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall kiss each other.

Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily overlooked,--we mean in _letters of introduction_. But the falsehood is only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege of all liberal arts, and promote the offices of a common brotherhood. How much we owe to these little paper messengers for the new treasures of love and learning they have brought! It is hard to tell whose debt to them is greatest, that of the giver, the bearer, or the receiver, or whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We are a little afraid of it, when it comes. A worthy man told me he knew not whether to be sorry or glad, when he found a letter addressed to him at the post-office. How does the balance incline, when a man or woman stands before us with a letter of introduction in hand? We eye it with a mistrust that it may turn out to be a tool of torture, serving us only for a sort of mental surgery. Frequently, it has been simply procured, and is but an impudent falsehood on its very face. The writer of it professes an admiration he does not feel for the person introduced, to whose own reading he leaves it magnificently open before its terms of exaggerated compliment can reach him to whom it is sent. What is the reason of this deceit? there is a ground for it, no doubt. "This effect defective comes by cause." The inditer has certainly some sympathy with the bearer he so amply commissions and wordily exalts. This bearer has some distress to be relieved, some faculty to exercise, some institution to recommend, or some ware to dispose of. He that forwards him to us very likely has first had him introduced to himself, has bestowed attention and hospitable fellowship upon him, and now, growing weary of the care and trouble and expense, is very happy to be rid of him at so small a cost as that of passing him on to a distant acquaintance by a letter of introduction, which the holder's business in life is to carry round from place to place through the world! Sometimes dear companions call on us to pay this tax; sometimes those who themselves have no claim on us. But, be it one class or the other, how little they may consider what they demand! Upon what a neglect or misappreciation of values the proceed! Verily we need a new Political Economy written, deeper than that of Malthus or Smith, to inform them. Our precious time, our cordial regards, the diversion of our mind from our regular duties, the neglect of already engrossing relations in our business or profession, the surrender of body and soul, they require for the prey of idlers and strangers! Had our correspondents drawn upon us for a sum of money, had a highwayman bid us stand and deliver our purse, we should not have been so much out of pocket. But we cannot help yielding; there is no excuse or escape. We are under the operation of that most delicate and resistless of powers no successor of Euclid ever explained the principle of, which may be called the _social screw_. We submit patiently, because we cannot endure to deny to the new-comer the assumed right of him who cruelly turns it, out of reach and out of sight. We know some men, of extraordinary strength of countenance themselves, who have been able to defend their door-stone against an impostor's brazen face. A good householder, when a stage-full of country-cousins came to his door, bade the driver take them to the hotel, and he would willingly pay the bills. But few have the courage thus to board out those who have a staff in their hands to knock at the very gate of their hearts. There would be satisfaction in the utmost amount of this labor and sacrifice, could we have any truth for its condition. But the falsehood has been written down by one whom we can nowise accuse. Alas! there is often as little truth in the entertainer. All together in the matter are walking in a vain show. We are at the mercy of a diviner's wand and a conjurer's spell. We have put on a foolish look of consent and compromise. We join with our new mate in extolling the wrong-doer who has inflicted him upon us. We dare not analyze the base alloy of the composition he conveys, which pretends to be pure gold. We must either act falsely ourselves, or charge falsehood upon others. We prefer the guilt to seeming unkindness; when, if we were perfectly good and wise, we should shake off the coil of deception, refuse insincere favors, and, however infinite and overflowing our benevolence, insist on doing, in any case, only willing and authentic good,--for affection is too noble to be feigned. "If," said Ole Bull, "I kiss my enemy, what have I left for my friend?" We must forgive and love our enemies and all men, and show our love by treating them without dissimulation, but a sublime openness, according to their needs and deserts.

The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but running through every section of human life. Our _acceptance_ of these notes is a commercial transaction, not of the fairest sort. It belongs to a species of trade in which we are made to pay other people's debts, and our dear friends and intimate relations sell us for some song or other which has been melodiously chanted into their own ears. "A new way to pay old debts," indeed! Every part of the bargain or trick of the game is by the main operators well known and availed of for their own behoof. By letter, persons have been introduced into circles where they had no footing, posts for whose responsibilities they were utterly unfit, and trusts whose funds they showed more faculty to embezzle than apply. Such licentious proceedings have good-natured concessions to wrong requests multiplied to the hurt of the commonweal. Let us beware of this kind of sympathetic lie, which ends in robbery, and swindles thousands out of what is more important than material property, for the support of pretenders that are worse than thieves, who are bold enough, like drones, to break into the hive of the busy and eat the honey they never gathered, absorbing to themselves, as far as they can, the courtesy of the useful members of the community by the worst monopoly in the world.

Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize the advantage of a right use, of this _introductory_ prerogative. What more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law, that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recipients of abundant tokens of good-will; and perhaps the familiar instance may have pardon for its recital, in illustration of the mercy which the letter-bearer may not seldom find. An epistle from a mutual acquaintance was our opportunity of intercourse with a venerable bachelor residing in the city of Antwerp. It was so urged upon us, that the least we could do was to present it, expecting only a few minutes' agreeable conversation. Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment, and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine, which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that _we could see mills in Lowell like those under his own control_. Perhaps, from his shrewd old head, as he kept his seat at his desk, like a sharp-shooter on the watch and wary for the foe, he only covered us with the surly weapon of his tongue in the equitable way for which we have here been contending ourselves! Certainly we were quite satisfied, if the Englishman was.

But printed lies, as well as written, are largely sympathetic. We are bitter against the press; and surely it needs a greater Luther for its reformer. But its follies are ours; its corruptions belong to its patrons. The editor of a paper edits the mind of those that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London "Times," already mentioned, is called the _Thunderer_; but, like the man behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers, make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others, among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the constituency which the paper represents.

It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have, among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets, historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name, whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed, and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the Transatlantics may yet behold.

The pulpit is but a sympathetic deceiver, when it violates the truth it is set to defend. All its lies are echoes of the avarice and inhumanity sitting in the pews; and when, in the rough old figure, it is a dumb dog that will not bark at the robber or warn us of danger, the real mutes, whom its silence but copies, are those demure men below who seem to listen to its instructions.

We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human auditor even of these electric accounts.

But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are, shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,--there is a sympathy of truth, to whose higher court and supreme verdict we must appeal. Before it let us stand ourselves, perpetual witnesses of the very truth of God in our breast. Said the lion-hearted Andrew Jackson, "When I decide on my course, I do not ask what people will think, but look into my own heart for guidance, believing that all brave men will agree with me."

"As the minister began on the subject of Slavery, I left the church," said a respectable citizen to a modest woman, of whose consent with him he felt sure.

"And did the minister go on?" she gently inquired.

"Yes, he went on," the mistaken citizen replied.

So, in this land, let us go on in the way of justice and truth we have at last begun. Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old, when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down. The domineering political and ecclesiastical usurpers of exclusive privilege will no longer give and take reciprocal support against the rising of mankind than the Roman augurs could at last keep one another in countenance. Let us go on, through dark omens as well as bright, and suffer ourselves to have no doubting day. Let us show that something besides a monarchy in this world can stand. On disbelievers and obstructers let us have companion. They cannot live contented, and it is not quite safe for them to die. The path of our progress opens clear. Let us not admit the idea of failure. To think of failing is to fail. As it was with the sick before their Saviour of old, only our faith can make us whole.

* * * * *

SOMETHING ABOUT BRIDGES.

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."