When there is a slight swell on the water,
they will come down in long, beautiful, perpendicular lines, mingling
exquisitely with the streaky green of reflected foliage; when there is
none, they become a distant image of the object they repeat, endowed
with infinite repose.
116. These remarks, true of small lakes whose edges are green, apply
with far greater force to sheets of water on which the eye passes over
ten or twenty miles in one long glance, and the prevailing color of
whose borders is, as we noticed when speaking of the Italian cottage,
blue. The white reflections are here excessively valuable, giving space,
brilliancy, and transparency; and furnish one very powerful apology,
even did other objections render an apology necessary, for the pale tone
of the color of the villas, whose reflections, owing to their size and
conspicuous situations, always take a considerable part in the scene,
and are therefore things to be attentively considered in the erection of
such buildings, particularly in a climate whose calmness renders its
lakes quiet for the greater part of the day. Nothing, in fact, can be
more beautiful than the intermingling of these bright lines with the
darkness of the reversed cypresses seen against the deep azure of the
distant hills in the crystalline waters of the lake, of which some one
aptly says, "Deep within its azure rest, white villages sleep
silently;"[18] or than their columnar perspective, as village after
village catches the light, and strikes the image to the very quietest
recess of the narrow water, and the very farthest hollow of the folded
hills.
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