GROUND, ROCK, Pf^ATER 137 



More than any other element in a landscape composition, a lake or 

 pond surface is a unified thing. It is all of the same material, sharply 

 contrasted with its surroundings, it lies all at the same level, and it 

 has from its motion, the sound of its waves, its constant play and 

 change under the influence of wind and current, a life and character 

 which is almost a personality. In its responsiveness to the forces of 

 wind and storm, in the suddenness with which it may pass from calm 

 to gayety, from gayety to gloom or fury, its range in emotional effect is 

 so great as to make it, in this respect, a thing apart from the other 

 elements of landscape except perhaps the sky. 



When a water surface is calm, it is diversified by the reflections of 

 its opposite shore, of the dark hollows under an overhanging tree or at 

 the foot of a great rock, of the lacework of a winter tree against the 

 sunset sky, all somewhat refined, etherealized, and harmonized by par- 

 taking of the tone of the water mirror. (See Plates 26 and 3 2, and 

 compare Drawing XXV, opp. p. 196, and Plate i.) When the surface 

 is ruffled by the breeze the reflections lose the beauty of exquisite de- 

 tail to take on the beauty of impressionistic color, into which the 

 brilliant reflection of the sky, repeated by the ripples in lines and 

 patches, is interwoven at the will of the wind with the darkness of the 

 reflection of the shore. This power of reflection gives any water sur- 

 face a strong appeal to the interest of the observer, and the smaller 

 natural water surfaces, — ponds, lakes, and rivers, — lying as they must 

 where the natural slopes of the land serve to direct the attention to 

 them and to center it upon them, are almost inevitably in each case the 

 heart of any composition in which they are included. (See Plate 28.) 



Lakes and ponds are almost always formed by the collection of Lakes 

 water in a valley hollowed out by some previously operating geologic 

 force. The form of a lake is therefore commonly the form of the 

 previously existing valley; and, for example, it will be irregular and 

 broken, with narrow arms and sharply jutting headlands, or it will be 

 rounded, with smoothly flowing curves of bay and promontory, ac- 

 cording as the original valley was carved by rapidly flowing water out 

 of hard rock, or formed, perhaps partly by erosion, partly by deposition, 

 out of the debris of a glacier or the sand and gravel of the lower reaches 

 of a slowly flowing river. The promontories in the lake will probably 



