They came and went like starry dreams, For ever moving on, As darkness takes the starry beams Unnoted till they’re gone.” There is something in a bridge, and especially in an old one, which has been time-worn and mossed into harmony with surrounding nature, which has always seemed peculiarly poetical or strange to men. Hence so many legends of devil’s bridges, and it is rather amusing when we reflect how, as Pontifex, he is thus identified with the head of the Church. Thus I once, when attending law lectures in Heidelberg in 1847, heard Professor Mittermaier say, that those who used the saying of “the divine right of kings” as an argument reminded him of the peasants who assumed that every old bridge was built by the devil. It is, however, simply the arch, which in any form is always graceful, and the stream passing through it like a living thing, which forms the artistic attraction or charm of such structures. I have mentioned in my “Memoirs” that Ralph Waldo Emerson was once impressed by a remark, the first time I met him, to the effect that a vase in a room had the effect of a bridge in a landscape—at least, he recalled it at once when I met him twenty years later. The most distinguished bridge, from a legendary point of view, in Europe, was that of Saint John Nepomuc in Prague—recently washed away owing to stupid neglect; the government of the city probably not supporting, like the king in the opera-bouffe of “Barbe Bleu,” a commissioner of bridges. The most picturesque work of the kind which I recall is that of the Ponte Maddalena—also a devil’s bridge—at the Bagni di Lucca. That Florence is not wanting in legends for its bridges appears from the following: THE SPIRIT OF THE PONTE VECCHIO OR OLD BRIDGE. “He who passes after midnight on the Ponte Vecchio can always see a form which acts as guard, sometimes looking like a beggar, sometimes like a _guardia di sicurezza_, or one of the regular watchmen, and indeed appearing in many varied forms, but generally as that of a watchman, and always leaning on the bridge. “And if the passer-by asks him any such questions as these: ‘Chi siei?’—‘Cosa fai?’—‘Dove abiti?’—‘Ma vien’ con me?’ That is: ‘Who are you?’—‘What dost thou do?’—‘Where is your home?’—‘Wilt with me come?’—he seems unable to utter anything; but if you ask him, ‘Who am I?’ it seems to delight him, and he bursts into a peal of laughter which is marvellously loud and ringing, so that the people in the shops waking up cry, ‘There is the goblin of the Ponte Vecchio at his jests again!’ For he is a merry sprite, and then they go to sleep, feeling peaceably assured that he will watch over them as of yore. “And this he really does for those who are faithful unto him. And those who believe in spirits should say sincerely: “‘Spirito del Ponte Vecchio, Guardami la mia bottega! Guardami dagli ladroni! Guardami anche dalla strega!’