After his father's death his mother married again, in 1854, to John Edward Nassau Molesworth, vicar of Rochdale, and the family moved there.

[2] He went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital, intending to practise until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry.

Lung disease forced Bridges to retire from his post as physician in 1885,[3] and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research.

As a poet Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision and delicacy yet strength of expression.

He also wrote verse plays, with limited success, and literary criticism, including a study of the work of John Keats.

"Melancholia" The sickness of desire, that in dark days Looks on the imagination of despair, Forgetteth man, and stinteth God his praise; Nor but in sleep findeth a cure for care.

Incertainty that once gave scope to dream Of laughing enterprise and glory untold, Is now a blackness that no stars redeem, A wall of terror in a night of cold.

Bridges received advice from the young phonetician David Abercrombie on the reformed spelling system he was devising for the publication of his collected essays (later published in seven volumes by Oxford University Press, with the help of the distinguished typographer Stanley Morison, who designed the new letters).

[8] Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1899 of his Yattendon Hymnal, which he created specifically for musical reasons.