“Gay prospects,” exclaimed Mr. Hardy, “wed happily with gay times; but, alas! if the times be not gay! Men have more often suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged.... Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new vale in Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer harmony with external things wearing a somberness distasteful to our race when it was young. Shall we say that man has grown so accustomed to his spiritual Bastille that he no longer looks forward to, and even shrinks from, a casual emergence into unusual brightness?” Even the best work of the period is blighted with this sombreness: the fact that so many of Richardson’s buildings have the heavy air of a prison shows us that the Gilded Age was not, indeed, gay, and that a spiritual Black Friday perpetually threatened the calendar of its days. IV If the romantic movement in America proved that the architect could capture only a small part of the field, and go no further than the interests of privilege allowed, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge showed how well industrialism could handle its problems when its purposes were not limited by the necessity for sloppy workmanship and quick turnover. The story of its building is a tribute to both science and humanity. When John Roebling, the designer of the bridge, died in the midst of his job, the business of construction was taken up by his son, and by his devotion to his task in season and out of season, Washington Roebling became an invalid. Confined to his house on Columbia Heights, for ten years the younger Roebling watched the work through a telescope, and directed it as a general would direct a battle. So goes the legend: it runs rather higher than the tales of mean prudence or mechanical skill which glorified Mr. Samuel Smiles’ heroes. The bridge itself was a testimony to the swift progress of physical science. The strong lines of the bridge, and the beautiful curve described by its suspended cables, were derived from an elegant formula in mathematical physics--the elastic curve. If the architectural elements of the massive piers have perhaps too much the bare quality of engineering, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal in the flat solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the masonry does not sing as Richardson alone perhaps could have made it sing, the steel work itself makes up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pattern; so that beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. In the later bridges the spanning members are sturdier and the supporting piers and cables are lighter and less essential; and they suffer esthetically by the very ease of their triumph over the difficulties of engineering.