The Swiss lakes differ in color; some appear to be green as malachite, and others blue. The water appears commonly of a bluish-green, shading into blue, with a slightly milky hue in the summer, especially when fed by the glacier streams, which bring down a quantity of finely triturated rock. Whenever a lake has high mountains rising from its edge, the hue is a purple-blue. The transparency of the lake waters is quite surprising; in many of them minute objects can be seen at a depth of fifty feet, and even lower down, as clearly as if viewed through a glass. There is a quiet luxury of excitement, without exercise, in voyaging in the well-appointed steamers on calm Swiss lakes, which present a shifting panorama of hill and river scenery.[99] There is much difference of opinion as to when the natural beauties and attractions of Switzerland appear to the best advantage. The larger number of strangers see the country only in its summer charms; it is a season when the mountains assume a greater brilliance of color and grandeur of form, the lower atmosphere being cleared of its dark mists as the clouds lift and give an ever-increasing flood of light. This greater altitude of the clouds brings the mountains into fuller sunshine, with their coloring more intense, their forms more massive, and the blue of the sky behind them deeper and clearer. Those who see the sun rise each morning in glory over the Alps, and glowing all day, set in a flood of crimson over the pines, only to return in the splendor of the after-glow on the glacier and snow, claim that autumn is a better time for realizing this sum of marvellous beauty; that it is the season of crimson and gold, when the landscapes take on incomparable magnificence, when the transformation of the woods is fairy-like, when the oaks are surrounded with a golden aureola, the beeches are dyed in vivid red and yellow, and all the wooded hills, orchards, hedges, and bushes form, as it were, a marvellous symphony of color, of warmer shades, and tints of an infinite tenderness. Then comes the advocate of winter, who says, “You should see the loads of snow, falling almost perpendicularly in thick, heavy flakes, or whirled about by the wild wind; on the calming of the snow-storm, you should see the heavy brown clouds in the south assume a tinge more and more golden and bright, till the first patch of blue sky bursts forth amidst the gigantic masses, and at last permits the winter sun, far down in the south, to gladden the earth with a brief sight of the source of light and life;” and that the trees are more beautiful in the hoar-frost than in summer or autumn glory; the pines, with their branches bent, “stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms,” and the taller trees seem to beckon with their long, white arms, like ghosts.