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Updated: April 30, 2025
The most appealing collection of flowering plants and vines that I ever saw was in Virginia, once, above the exquisite valley spanned by the Natural Bridge, a valley far too little known or praised. I had noticed an old log house, as I learned to know the outlook from the picturesque hotel, and was sure that it must give a charming view from its perch on the summit of a hill.
We were on our feet all night, crossing the corduroy bridge that spanned the stream at the further side of the swamp as daylight began to show in the East. The ground beyond the swamp was a bluff some 20 or 30 feet above it, and on the brow of it our guns were placed later in the day. Back of the bluff was a large, open field, which was literally packed with artillery and baggage wagons.
Their hearts were too full to answer, and their eyes were moist with tears; for they could not conceal from themselves that there were many very considerable dangers which we must encounter on the road. They stood watching us while we wound our way down the steep path, and crossed the bridge which spanned the river at the bottom of the ravine.
This capital and stronghold was continually exposed to storms of civil war and foreign invasion; and its turreted battlements and ponderous gates, with the wide deep moat spanned by drawbridges, where now is a forest of great trees, were but the necessary fences behind which court and garrison took shelter from the tempestuous barbarism in the midst of which they lived.
One thing, at least, I think it would do for us: there is no surer test of a great country than how near it stands to its own poets; but between the singers of our day and the workers to whom they would sing there seems to be an ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which slander and mockery cannot traverse, but which is spanned by the luminous wings of love.
While the rainbow spanned the plain, and the thunder still rolled in the distance, all the opposite heaven cleared almost to the furthest horizon; but there a remoter range yet lay half-covered by a billowy mass of clouds, like the hull of a dismasted ship in the folds of her fallen sails.
Presently appeared the heavy walls inclosing the City itself, dominated by the tall openwork timber spire of Saint Paul's, with the four-square, four-turreted Tower acting, as it has been well said, as a padlock to a chain, and the river's breadth spanned by London bridge, a very street of houses built on the abutments.
In Greece beautiful woods of pine, oak, and other trees still linger on the slopes of the high Arcadian mountains, still adorn with their verdure the deep gorge through which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus, and were still, down to a few years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the lonely lake of Pheneus; but they are mere fragments of the forests which clothed great tracts in antiquity, and which at a more remote epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from sea to sea.
As we approached the table rock, a rainbow of splendid dyes spanned the river; rising from out the driving mist from the American Fall, until it melted into the leaping snowy foam of the great Canadian cataract.
It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade.
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