Two bridges lie near each other, across the historical stream of the Moldau, under the shadow of the ancient and haughty palace at Prague--the one the picturesque bridge of St. Nepomuk, patron of bridges throughout Bohemia, of massive stone, which occupied a century and a half in its erection, and was finished almost four centuries ago, with stately statues along its sides, with a superb monument at its end, sustaining symbolic and portrait figures; the other an iron suspension-bridge, built and finished in three years, a half century since, and singularly contrasting, in its lightness and grace, the sombre solidity of the first. It is impossible to look upon the two without feeling how distinctly the different ages to which they belong are indicated by them, and how the ceremonial and military character of the centuries that are past has been superseded by the rapid and practical spirit of commerce. But the modern bridge is there a small one, and rests at the centre on an island and a pier. The structure before us, the largest of its class as yet in the world, in its swifter, more graceful, and more daring leap from bank to bank, across the tides of this arm of the sea, not only illustrates the bolder temper which is natural here, the readiness to attempt unparalleled works, the disdain of difficulties in unfaltering reliance on exact calculation, but, in the material out of which it is wrought, it shows the new supremacy of man over the metal which, in former time, he scarcely could use save for rude and coarse implements. The steel of the blades of Damascus or Toledo is not here needed; nor that of the chisel, the knife-blade, the watch-spring, or the surgical instrument. But the steel of the mediæval lance-head or sabre was hardly finer than that which is here built into a Castle, which the sea cannot shake, whose binding cement the rains cannot loosen, and before whose undecaying parapets open fairer visions of island and town, of earth, water, and sky, than from any fortress along the Rhine. There is inexhaustible promise in the fact. Of course, too, there is impressively before us--installed as on this fair and brilliant civic throne--that desire for swiftest intercommunication between towns and districts divided from each other, which belongs to our times, and which is to be an energetic, enduring, and salutary force in moulding the nation.