and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with
dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a
flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!

In such a day in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest
mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or
rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a
lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs
no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which
no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding
Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever
fresh--a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and
dusted by the sun's hazy brush--this the light dust-cloth--which retains
no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds
high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate
in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees
wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the
breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is
remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look
down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still
subtler spirit sweeps over it.

The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of
October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November,
usually, on a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the
surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm
of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast