Milton did the river a huge injustice when he called this the "coaly Tyne." His intention was innocent enough, no doubt, since he meant only to acknowledge its celebrity in connection with coal. But it is the fate of these indecisively descriptive phrases to be misunderstood. The Tyne is a brighter and clearer stream than the Mersey, is immeasurably purer than the Thames, is only occasionally muddied like the Humber, and is at no time discoloured by coal. When there are floods in the upper reaches, so much brown soil is carried down by the impetuous water that the current of the river can be traced far out to sea; but at ordinary seasons the local colour of the Tyne approaches that of the sea itself, and is, in fact, a deep, clear olive-green. What is insufficiently understood, however, is that the local colour of a stream is that which is most seldom disclosed. Water takes its hue from the sky above it, and from the light which plays about its face. Hence Spenser's beautiful and much assailed phrase, "the silver-streaming Thames." Hence, also, the Tyneside poet's eulogy of his native stream:-- "Of all the rivers, north or south, There's none like coaly Tyne." The Romans threw three bridges across the river. There was one which crossed with the wall at Chollerford; and there was one which crossed with the Watling Street at Corbridge; and there was a third, earlier and far more important than the other two, which linked together what were afterwards to be named the counties of Durham and Northumberland. The bridge at Newcastle, built by Hadrian on his first visit to these northern parts of Roman Britain, was deemed of so much importance that at Rome a medal was struck to commemorate its erection. Also it gave its name to the Roman station which stood on the heights above. Newcastle first became known to history as Pons Ælii, in honour alike of Hadrian's bridge and of Hadrian's family. And ever since that day the town has been famous for its bridges. There was one which resembled London Bridge in having shops almost from end to end. It endured, says an eloquent local historian, "from the times of the Plantagenets, and through the Wars of the Roses, past Bosworth and Flodden Fields and the Armada, down to the encounter of the King and Parliament, to the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Revolution; and beyond the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 it kept its accustomed place across the stream, surviving the daily pressure of the tide, the rage of inundations, the bumping of barges and keels, the shocks of civil war, the negligent inattentions of peace." But at length large portions of it were swept away by the great flood of 1771, one of its houses being carried whole as far as Jarrow Slake, some miles farther down the Tyne.