How richly glows the water's breast, Before us tinged with evening's hues, When facing thus the crimson west, The boat her silent course pursues, And see how dark the backward stream, A little moment past so smiling! And still perhaps some faithless gleam, Some other loiterer beguiling. Such views the youthful bard allure, But heedless of the following gloom, He dreams their colors shall endure Till peace go with him to the tomb. And let him nurse his fond deceit; And what if he must die in sorrow Who would not cherish dreams so sweet; Though grief and pain may come tomorrow. --Wordsworth. The ancients believed that the alchemists could create rose blooms out of their ashes. We are prone to believe it for, at the close of a fair New England day we have seen the Master Alchemist, the sun, beneath his spacious workshop of July skies, transmuting the gray mists and vapors into sunset's glow; and lo! we had the blooming roses there. He melted his many ingredients with the falling dew and distilled from them the gold with which he burnished the western sky, making it glow like a glassy sea. Seizing upon some more potent fluid, he threw it among the fleecy clouds, kindling them all along the horizon until they shone like a vast lake of flame; then taking his magic wand, he waved it over the glowing mass and crimson changed to rosy pink, pink to glowing purple; forming those royal gates through which the magician passed behind the distant foothills of the Adirondacks. During such a pageant of splendor as this o'er head, did we first behold the placid waters of Lake Champlain. Far away beyond the Vermont shore rose the Green mountains behind their misty veils of purplish-blue. High above the lower undulations loomed the forest crowned ridges, gloriously colored and radiant, forming a mysterious yet fitting background for the exquisite picture before us. The nearer hills from their tops and extending far down their sides were covered with evergreens; below them a purple belt of deciduous trees and bright green meadows made a vivid contrast; while the nearer valley was filled with clumps of trees, fields of grain and crimson clover. Before us lay the tranquil lake flecked with islands, which looked like floating gardens of green on a purple mirror. Near us a wooden bridge led across a shallow cove passing between myriads of pickerel weed whose light purple spathes formed a striking mass of color. Beneath it long, slender patches of silvery blue rushes made magic hedges, so symmetrical as to seem clipped by the hand of art. So ethereal in their loveliness were they, we could account for their presence in no other way than being woven by the genii of the lake out of the purple bloom that surrounded it.