"Then the folks a bridge did make Over the stream unto the heck, All of wood eke long and wide, Pride and glory of the tide, Which in time did fall away. Then Earl Leof he besped This great river from its bed, Round his castle for to run; 'Twas in truth an ancient one; But war and time will all decay. "Now again with mighty force, Severn in his ancient course, Rolls his rapid stream along, With a sand both swift and strong, Whelming many an oaken wood. We, the men of Bristol town, Have rebuilt this bridge of stone, Wishing each that it may last Till the date of days be past, Standing where the other stood." Now, would it ever have been believed, had not the thing really taken place in its unmitigated strangeness, that such poetry as this--poetry, indeed, of which these are but mere fragments, which, while they display the power, poetic freedom, and intellectual riches of the writer, do not show the breadth and grandeur of his plans, to be seen only in the works themselves--that they could have been presented to the public, and passed over with contempt, not a century ago? Would it have been credited, that the leading men of the literary world at that time, instead of flinging back such poems at the boy who presented them as a discovered antiquity, were not struck with the amazing fact, that if the boy were an impostor, as they avowed--if he, indeed, _had written them himself_, that he must be a _glorious_ impostor? Yet Horace Walpole, Gray, Mason, Sam Johnson, and the whole British throng of literati, were guilty of this blindness!