If by living thus reserved and austere, like
a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity,
who would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of Flint's
Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its
sweetness in the ocean wave?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 65: From Chapter IX of "Walden," 1854.]
[Footnote 66: The Castalian Fountain on Mount Parnassus was sacred to
Apollo and the Muses.]
[Footnote 67: With net-like markings.]
[Footnote 68: Speckled.]
[Footnote 69: The hero of an old ballad.]
SELECTIONS FROM RUSKIN
A. LEAFAGE OF TREES[70]
One of the most remarkable characters of natural leafage is the
constancy with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with
exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual
effect. For as in every group of leaves some are seen sideways, forming
merely long lines, some foreshortened, some crossing each other, every
one differently turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the
leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand strange
and differing forms in the group; and the shadows of some, passing over
the others, still farther disguise and confuse the mass until the eye
can distinguish nothing but a graceful and flexible disorder of
innumerable forms, with here and there a perfect leaf on the extremity,
or a symmetrical association of one or two, just enough to mark the
specific character and to give unity and grace, but never enough to
repeat in one group what was done in another, never enough to prevent
the eye from feeling that, however regular and mathematical may be the
structure of parts, what is composed out of them is as various and
infinite as any other part of nature.
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