Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness... of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love to chawnk green apples an' go swimmin' in the lake.--... Hate to take the castor-ile they give for belly-ache! 'Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain't no flies on me, But jest 'fore Christmas I'm as good as I kin be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer c...an cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or supramarine transportation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the... Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mountain may be approached more easily and directly on horseback and on foot from the northeast side, by the Aroostook road, a...nd the Wassataquoik River; but in that case you see much less of the wilderness, none of the glorious river and lake scenery, and have no experience of the batteau and the boatman's life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, ...I pray?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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;Ma 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills wh...ich rise from the water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, inclu...ded,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »