There Nature has woven
a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low
shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's
hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years
ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is
earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his
own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender
eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are
its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a
calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore
line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy
surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of
finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the
distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from
another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the
opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it.
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