One may recoil with a painful sense of material incongruity, as did Hawthorne, when contemplating the noisome suburban street where Burns lived; but all the humane and poetical associations connected with the long struggle sustained by him, of "the highest in man's soul against the lowest in man's destiny," recur in sight of the Bridge of Doon, and the two "briggs of Ayr," whose "imaginary conversations" he caught and recorded, or that other bridge which spans a glen on the Auchinleck estate, where the rustic bard first saw the Lass of Ballochmyle. The tender admiration which embalms the name of Keats is also blent with the idea of a bridge. The poem which commences his earliest published volume was suggested, according to Milnes, as he "loitered by the gate that leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath to the field by Camwood"; and the young poet told his friend Clarke that the sweet passage, "Awhile upon some bending planks," came to him as he hung "over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton." To the meditative pedestrian, indeed, such places lure to quietude; the genial Country Parson, whose "Recreations" we have recently shared, unconsciously illustrates this, when he speaks of the privilege men like him enjoy, when free "to saunter forth with a delightful sense of leisure, and know that nothing will go wrong, although he should sit down on the mossy parapet of the little one-arched bridge that spans the brawling mountain-stream." On that Indian-summer day when Irving was buried, no object of the familiar landscape, through which, without formality, and in quiet grief, so many of the renowned and the humble followed his remains from the village-church to the rural graveyard, wore so pensive a fitness to the eye as the simple bridge over Sleepy-Hollow Creek, near to which Ichabod Crane encountered the headless horseman,--not only as typical of his genius, which thus gave a local charm to the scene, but because the country-people, in their heartfelt wish to do him honor, had hung wreaths of laurel upon the rude planks.