er 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.
Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, as it were by mistake, and
are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to
employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well
as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two,
you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass,
except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its
whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable
sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said,
a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a
fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one
bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water;
sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps,
is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and
so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed,
and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in
glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated
from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs,
resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any
part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth
surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.
It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
advertised--this piscine murder will out--and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surf