The next plunge should be in the waters themselves, and only thus shall you learn to the full what a miracle the pond is. Here is a crater of glacier-crushed granite, out of which never came smoke nor lava, only a white fire from unexplored depths, a fire of cool austerity which burns the dross out of all that may be put into it. There is no inflowing stream. Its waters well up from a mysterious source within the very earth. Their outflow is equally invisible. In their going they leap spirit-like along the golden stairs which the sun lets down to them and pass up for the building of rainbows, their white light breaking in its mystical seven colors, a visible ecstasy to all who watch the heavens. To plunge in these waters at dawn is to feel this cool fire thrill through the marrow of your bones, and only by total immersion shall you know to the full its purity. Coming to such a flight with Eos through the dusky solemnity of the trees of the western bank, I saw the pond silvered beneath its tense level with the frosty scintillations of the stars that had shone into it all night. It was as if their radiance had but penetrated the water-tension film of the surface and collected just beneath it, making a white mirror which my plunge shattered into a thousand prisms of scintillant light. The dancing night winds had shaken all the rich odors from the white clethra blooms that grow all about the pond’s rim and stored them along its surface, and to swim out toward the center was to enter a sweetly perfumed bath. The forest to eastward, full of black density, as it was, could not bar out the rose of the morning from the sight. Instead it stood in a silhouetted fretting against it and let its glow shine through a million tiny windows of the day, blossoming again in the ripples ahead. Here was a moving picture of the blooming and vanishing of pink meadow-flowers, flashing a brief life upon the film, vanishing and growing again. The cinematograph is nothing new. Walden has operated it for those who will swim toward the dawn in its waters since the centuries began. In our theaters we are but tawdry imitators of its film productions.