Quotation of the day

A little bit of literature as these fall days begin to feel more like winter...

{Pond by our house}

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.  It is earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature....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; -- a 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."

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "The Ponds"