Have you seen the Lake when thunder-storms are brooding all around the horizon, and the wrath of the tempest is sweeping up from the west, where, in thundering caverns, the Titans are forging the bolts? You may, now and then, hear the clang of their hammers, and see the fire from their anvils, what time gigantic masses of clouds, assuming fantastic shapes and dark forms of demons, come tearing their way to the zenith. In the east all is quiet, and the fleecy, cumulous clouds, towering up like peaks of snow, and illuminated by the waning sun, send straight pink shafts of light across the dull, blue surface of the Lake. In the distance, this blue is changed to the most delicate green. Watch it, and in a moment it will change to blue again, and then again to green; and the shafts of pink light on its surface will come and go like the blushes upon a girl's cheek. Never mind the near approach of the storm. You cannot afford to lose the Lake yet. As the black clouds gather in the east, the blues and the greens disappear, and the Lake turns to black, reflecting the wrath of the clouds above. The darts of the lightning descend into it, and the crash of the thunder borne over its surface is almost deafening. The sound of the waves dies away. Long, smooth, irregular patches appear, looking as if the air had died above them. A few heavy spats of rain strike here and there. A dense mist begins to settle down. Faster and faster the rain-drops fall, and now the mad gods are all abroad; and in the mists there, the lightnings are rending the bosom of the Lake. But, in the midst of all the din, if you only listen acutely, you will hear the steady patter of the rain in the water—a soothing, tranquilizing sound; and in some dense forest, if you were lying upon the needle-covered ground, you would hear exactly the same sound made by the wind in the tree-tops. And now, if you could sleep in some old-fashioned attic, without a care or a trouble in your breast, where you could hear the rain playing its merry fantasie on the shingles, you would sleep the most refreshing of all sleeps.
And then there are days when the heavens are cloudless, the temperature cool, and the breeze blowing briskly and steadily from the north, that the Lake is a very kaleidoscope of colors, and puts on a habit it has borrowed from fairy-land. Start with the extreme eastern limit, and you may trace nearly all the primitive colors of the prism, with their variations at intervals—blue, light green, grass-green, and the green of the waters in which the icebergs float, light and dark bronze, silvery gray, pink and purple, and a dull, dead gray color, close by you. Let but the breeze be strong enough to comb the crest of the waves into foam, and a more beautiful sight it would be impossible to conceive. These colors are not fixed. The smallest cloud which passes over the sky will agitate and intermingle them in a very chaos of beauty, but as the cloud disappears they will return to their original order. Sometimes a larger cloud will hurry across the sky, fleeing from its shadow, which skims over the lake, as you have seen the same shadows skim over a meadow, and this shadow will absorb color after color and leave a new one in its place, so that the whole of them will often be reversed. In such seasons, the lake is a perfect picture of life, with its phases of trouble, of mirth, of youthful vivacity, of ambition, of hope, and of despair. Your life and my life are there, with all the dreams we have dreamed and the loves we have loved—with the bubbles which fancy has blown, and the castles we have built in the air—with the ties which have been formed and been broken—with the fates which have brought you and me together, like ships upon the ocean, to meet for a minute and hold converse, and then sail again and apart into the opposite horizons; and yet always teaching the lesson that, in the darkest moments, there is compensation in the great beauty and blessing of nature, and that the Great Mother, who always clothes every material wreck with loveliness, and makes it beautiful and sacred to the eye, can also bring balm to every wrecked life, if we only approach her with loving hearts and outstretched arms.
There is another aspect of the Lake, which I hope you will never see. It is when the air is sultry and heavy with moisture; when a chill, penetrating wind has settled down upon it, as in the late falls; when you can see only a stone's throw from the shore; when the water is of a dull, milky color, and its wash against the sand is sullen and despondent, and there is not a pleasant sound or sight. The Lake then is suicidal in its tendencies, and is deliberately inviting you or Atropos to sever the thread in your web of life. Keep away from the Lake at such times, for it is a very monster, and you can have no good thoughts in its presence.
August 1, 1868.
[RIP VAN WINKLE.]
