It didn't seem right to see a reference to "the rude bridge that SPANNED the flood" and now I don't even remember where I saw the reference. I was sure it was "arched the flood" and I thought it was the "Concord Hymn." I thought the author to be Longfellow, but it turns out to be Emerson. Bad as my memory for this sort of thing is, the first two verses are still there in my head after all this time, just another remnant of a nineteenth-century education in the twentieth century.