iler from whose fierce and
untiring heart their force is supplied, it is equally apt; while, as
drawn into delicate wires, it is coiled into springs, woven into
gauze, sharpened into needles, twisted into ropes; it is made to yield
music in all our homes; electric currents are sent upon it, along our
streets, around the world; it enables us to talk with correspondents
afar, or it is knit, as before our eyes, into the new and noble
causeways of pleasure and of commerce.

I hardly think that we yet appreciate the significance of this change
which has passed upon iron. It is the industrial victory of the
century, not to have heaped the extracted gold in higher piles, or to
have crowded the bursting vaults with accumulated silver, but to have
conferred, by the sovereign touch of scientific invention,
flexibility, grace, variety of use, an almost ethereal and spiritual
virtue, on the stubbornest of common metals. The indications of
physical achievement in the future, thus inaugurated, outrun the
compass of human thought.

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of the centuries that are past has been superseded by the rapid and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 sh