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 Trinita with its moss-grown escutcheons and
aerial 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, La