ed in their meadows and forests
and glacier-sculptured rocks.

When a mountain lake is born,--when, like a young eye, it first opens to
the light,--it is an irregular, expressionless crescent, inclosed in
banks of rock and ice,--bare, glaciated rock on the lower side, the
rugged snout of a glacier on the upper. In this condition it remains for
many a year, until at length, toward the end of some auspicious cluster
of seasons, the glacier recedes beyond the upper margin of the basin,
leaving it open from shore to shore for the first time, thousands of
years after its conception beneath the glacier that excavated its basin.
The landscape, cold and bare, is reflected in its pure depths; the winds
ruffle its glassy surface, and the sun fills it with throbbing spangles,
while its waves begin to lap and murmur around its leafless
shores,--sun-spangles during the day and reflected stars at night its
only flowers, the winds and the snow its only visitors. Meanwhile, the
glacier continues to recede, and numerous rills, still younger than the
lake itself, bring down glacier-mud, sand-grains, and pebbles, giving
rise to margin-rings and plats of soil. To these fresh soil-beds come
many a waiting plant. First, a hardy carex with arching leaves and a
spike of brown flowers; then, as the seasons grow warmer, and the
soil-beds deeper and wider, other sedges take their appointed places,
and these are joined by blue gentians, daisies, dodecatheons, violets,
honeyworts, and many a lowly moss. Shrubs also hasten in time to the new
gardens,--kalmia with its glossy leaves and purple flowers, the arctic
willow, making soft woven carpets, together with the heathy bryanthus
and cassiope, the fairest and dearest of them all. Insects now enrich
the air, frogs pipe cheerily in the shallows, soon followed by the
ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is
the first of plants.

So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly
lovable from century to century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy
pines, and the Hemlock Spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and
embowered. But while its shores are being enriched, the soil-beds creep
out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter
mud-particles deposited on the bottom cause it to grow constantly
shallower, until at length the last remnant of the lake
vanishes,--closed forever in ripe and natural old age. And now its
feeding-stream goes