oo
Pool.

The banks of Loo Pool stretch on either side to the length of two miles;
the lake, which in summer occupies little more than half the space that
it covers in winter, is formed by the flow of two or three small
streams. You first reach it from Helston, after a walk of half a mile;
and then see before you, on either hand, long ranges of hills rising
gently from the water's edge, covered with clustering trees, or occupied
by wide cornfields and sloping tracts of common land. So far, the
scenery around Loo Pool resembles the scenery around other lakes; but as
you proceed, the view changes in the most striking and extraordinary
manner. Walking on along the winding banks of the pool, you taste the
water and find it soft and fresh, you see ducks swimming about in it
from the neighbouring farm-houses, you watch the rising of the fine
trout for which it is celebrated--every object tends to convince you
that you are wandering by the shores of an inland lake--when suddenly at
a turn in the hill slope, you are startled by the shrill cry of the
gull, and the fierce roar of breakers thunders on your ear--you look
over the light grey waters of the lake, and behold, stretching
immediately above and beyond them, the expanse of the deep blue ocean,
from which they are only separated by a strip of smooth white sand!

You hurry on, and reach this bar of sand which parts the great English
Channel and the little Loo Pool--a child might run across it in a
minute! You stand in the centre. On one side, close at hand, water is
dancing beneath the breeze in glassy, tiny ripples; on the other,
equally close, water rolls in mighty waves, precipitated on the ground
in dashing, hissing, writhing floods of the whitest foam--here,
children are floating mimic boats on a mimic sea; there, the stateliest
ships of England are sailing over the great deep--both scenes visible in
one view. Rocky cliffs and arid sands appear in close combination with
rounded fertile hills, and long grassy slopes; salt spray leaping over
the first, spring-water lying calm beneath the last! No fairy vision of
Nature that ever was imagined is more fantastic, or more lovely than
this glorious reality, which brings all the most widely contrasted
characteristics of a sea view and an inland view into the closest
contact, and presents them in one harmonious picture to the eye.

The ridge of sand between Loo Pool and the sea, which, by impeding the
flow of the inland strea