“Call spirits from the vasty deep,”
who will not
“Come when you do call for them.”
What to do, then? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain.
“Keine luft an keine seite,
Todes-stille fürchterlich;”
as Göthe has it—
“Und der schiffer sieht bekümmert
Glatte fläche rings umher.”
You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come, if it had any spirit in it; tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep. In the meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been half-an-hour’s lively fishing curl; and you wake just in time to see the last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all as dead-calm as before.
Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked quietly round the lake side, and asked of your own brains and of Nature the question, “How did this lake come here? What does it mean?”
It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There must have been huge forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably the mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and when the strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm, being perhaps crushed together with greater force, remained higher than the centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was formed thus. You will at least agree that its formation must have been a grand sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had some difficulty in keeping his footing.