depends on the position of the eye. The more you look
down into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you
look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of
objects above it. Hence the colour of a given space of surface in a
stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot,
merely as you stoop or raise your head; and thus the colours with which
water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and
connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. The most
beautiful of all results that I know in mountain streams is when the
water is shallow, and the stones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange
and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly divides the
visible colours between those of the stones and that of the sky, and the
sky is of clear, full blue. The resulting purple obtained by the
blending of the blue and the orange-red, broken by the play of
innumerable gradations in the stones, is indescribably lovely.

All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong
colour in the clear water itself, as of green or blue in the Swiss
lakes, all these phenomena are doubly involved; for the darker
reflections now become of the colour of the water. The reflection of a
black gondola, for instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark
green. And, farther, the colour of the water itself is of three kinds:
one, seen on the surface, is a kind of milky bloom; the next is seen
where the waves let light through them, at their edges; and the third,
shown as a change of colour on the objects seen through the water. Thus,
the same wave that makes a white object look of a clear blue, when seen
through it, will take a red or violet-coloured bloom on its surface, and
will be made pure emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its
edges. With all this, however, you are not much concerned at present,
but I tell it you partly as a preparation for what we have afterwards to
say about colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and streams
with reverence, and study them as carefully as other things, not hoping
to express them by a few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous
blots.[232] Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you
know precisely what you mean by them, as you will see by many of the
Turner sketches, which are now framed at the National Gallery; but you
must have painted water many and many a