Lakes

"Here is beauty indeed – Beauty lying in the lap of Horrour!"

"Here is Skiddaw and then, between thickets and parks, the delightful Lake Windermere, which I drew on an evening so sweet and peaceful that I felt uneasy with happiness; the sunset was combing the curly wavelets with a golden comb, and here the pilgrim sat by the quiet reeds and had no desire to go home again, so dazing and peaceful was the water."

"Know, too, that when a pilgrim strays, In morning mist or evening maze, Along the mountain lone, That fairy fortress often mocks His gaze upon the castled rocks Of the Valley of Saint John."

"I rode over to Lorton, a little village at the foot of a high mountain. Many came from a considerable distance, and I believe did not repent of their labour; for they found God to be a God both of the hills and valleys, and no where more present than in the mountains of Cumberland."

"It was customary, I am told, to dash by [the Lakes] with an exclamation or two of "Oh, how fine!" &c. – or as a gentleman said to Robin Partridge the day after we were upon Windermere, "Good God! how delightful! – how charming! – I could live here for ever! – Row on, row on, row on, row on;" and, after passing one hour of exclamations upon the Lake, and half an hour at Ambleside, he ordered his horses into his phaeton, and flew off to take (I doubt not) an equally flying view of Derwentwater."

"Nor were these hills high and formidable only, but they had a kind of an unhospitable terror in them. Here were no rich pleasant valleys between them, as among the Alps; no lead mines and veins of rich oar, as in the Peak; no coal pits, as in the hills about Hallifax, much less gold, as in the Andes, but all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast…Here we entred Westmoreland, a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales it self."

"Right before me is a great camp of single mountains – each in shape resembles a Giant's Tent; and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite Water to my right, is the lake of Keswick, with its islands and white sails, and glossy lights of evening – crowned with green meadows. But the three remaining sides are encircled by the most fantastic mountains, that ever earthquakes made in sport; as fantastic, as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion, in which they were made."

"Skiddaw shews its vast base, and bounding all that part of the vale, rises gently to a height that sinks the neighboring hills; opens a pleasing front, smooth and verdant, smiling over the country like a gentle generous lord, while the fells of Borrowdale frown on it like a hardened tyrant."

"The full perfection of Keswick consists of three circumstances, beauty, horror, and immensity united…But to give you a complete idea of these three perfections, as they are joined in Keswick, would require the united powers of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin. The first should throw his delicate sunshine over the cultivated vales, the scattered cots, the groves, the lake, and wooded islands. The second should dash out the horror of the rugged cliffs, the steeps, the hanging woods, and foaming waterfalls; while the grand pencil of Poussin should crown the whole with the majesty of the impending mountains."

"The Lake country is a glorious region, of which I had only seen the similitude in dreams, waking or sleeping…I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales."

"The whole view is entirely of the horrid kind. Not a tree appeared to add the least chearfulness to it. With regard to the adorning of such a scene with figures, nothing could suit it better than a group of banditti. Of all the scenes I ever saw, this was the most adapted to the perpetration of some dreadful deed."

"We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, & I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine I have satisfied myself, that there is such a thing as that, which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before."

"With Wordsworth, the mountains of Cumberland passed into World Literature, became, like the music of Beethoven and the paintings of Turner, symbols of the power, the vitality, the force of nature and super-nature which haunted and compelled the imagination of the nineteenth century."

"Your sport, my Lord, I cannot take, For I must go and hunt a lake; And while you chase the flying deer, I must fly off to Windermere. Instead of hallooing to a fox, I must catch echoes from the rocks; With curious eye and active scent, I on the Picturesque am bent."

"The trees of Lakeland contribute much to the matchless beauty of the district, and indeed it would be difficult to imagine the setting of some of the lakes and many of the valleys without them."

"I am beside the lake (Como), / The lonely lake which used to be / The wide world of the beating heart / When I was, love, with thee."

"And dimly seen, a tangled mass. Of Walls and woods of light and shade. Stands beckoning up the Stelvio pass Varenna, with its white cascade. I ask myself is this a dream? Will it all vanish into air? Is there a land of such supreme. And perfect beauty anywhere! Sweet vision! Do not fade away; Linger until my heart shall take- Into itself the Summer day And all the beauty of the lake."

"And, (Lake) Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth / Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth / Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake / Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots / Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids; / Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roofed with vines, / Winding from house to house, from town to town, / Sole link that binds them to each other ; walks, / League after league, and cloistral avenues, / Where silence dwells if music be not there."

"In the past, the rich bought houses and villas only on the hills of Lake Como, as Pliny did with Villa Commedia, in order not to lose their sight and to avoid flooding. "The poor went to the shore to have the water lick their feet"."

"Everything is noble and delicate (on Lake Como), everything speaks of love, nothing recalls the ugliness of civilization."

"No sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks / The silence of the summer day, / As by the loveliest of all lakes / I while the idle hours away."

"That there is a God, when you look at the sky of Lake Como, is evident. (Robin Williams)"

"[...] at eventide when everything seems to slumber , and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the Lake of Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose."

"Lake Como [...] is not like Lake Geneva surrounded by large fields well delimited and cultivated with the best systems, which suggest money and speculation. Here, wherever I turn, I see hills of unequal altitudes clothed with trees planted at will that the hand of man has not yet damaged and forced to bear fruit. Among these hills with admirable lines that plummet towards the lake for so singular steep slopes [...]. Everything here nobly, exquisitely speaks of love, there is nothing that reminds you of the ugliness of civilization."

"When you write the story of two happy lovers, place them on the shores of Lake Como. I do not know a district more manifestly blessed by heaven; I've never seen another where the charms of a life of love would seem more natural [...] and start it with these words: "On the shores of Lake Como.""

"You, Lario (Lake Como) very great. (Virgil)"

"Who that looks on these tawny hills | Cradling calm day new-born, | Who that sips mead from Como’s stills | This fragrant, sun-bathed morn, Will, bating reverende, record | Fair Como’s wrathful, ways, | And wont only ungrateful, hoard | The tale of her «bade days’?» | To day her ripples play bo-peep, | And dimple at the rocks | Lack in melodious mimicry | A sounding billow mocks."

"The lake as a whole is sweet, loving, Italian. Steep close-ups, warm colors of the houses; snowy horizon and all bordered by splendid houses, made for study and for love. – Taglioni, Pasta, on the left bank of the lake starting from Como. – Villa Sommariva; stone stairway descending into the water to embark on the gondola, large trees, roses blooming on a fountain."

"It is the most voluptuous place I have ever seen in the world. Nature enchants with a thousand unknown seductions and one feels in a state of rare sensuality and refinement."

"One is still close to the mountains (of Lake Como) and yet the desire already perceives the plain and a vast silent fertility."

"Remember how we came at last To Como; shower and storm and blast Had blown the lake beyond his limit, And all was flooded; and how we pastFrom Como, when the light was gray, And in my head, for half the day, The rich Virgilian rustic measure Of Lari Maxume, all the way,Like ballad-burthen music, kept, As on The Lariano crept To that fair port below the castle Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;Or hardly slept, but watch’d awake A cypress in the moonlight shake, The moonlight touching o’er a terrace One tall Agavè above the lake."

"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. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows."

"It forms a little world within itself,—a microcosm within which all the elemental forces are at work and the play of life goes on in full, but on so small a scale as to bring it easily within the mental grasp."

"A lake Is a river curled and asleep like a snake."

"Nine sites line the shore of Onondaga Lake, around which the present-day city of , has grown. Thanks to more than a century of industrial development, the lake known as one of North America's most sacred sites is now known as one of the most polluted lakes in the United States. Drawn by abundant resources and the coming of the , the captains of industry brought their innovations to Onondaga territory. Early journals record that smokestacks made the air "a choking miasma." The manufacturers were happy to have Onondaga Lake so close at hand, to use as a dumping ground. Millions of tons of were slurried onto the lake bottom. The growing city followed suit, adding sewage to the suffering of the waters. It is as if the newcomers to Onondaga Lake had declared war, not on each other, but with the land."

"From across the water, the western shore stands out in sharp relief. Bright white bluffs gleam in the summer sun like the White Cliffs of Dover. But when you approach by water, you’ll see that the cliffs are not rock at all, but sheer walls of Solvay waste. While your boat bobs on the waves, you can see erosion gullies in the wall, the weather conspiring to mix the waste into the lake: summer sun dries out the pasty surface until it blows, and subzero winter temperatures fracture it off in plates that fall to the water. A beach beckons around the point but there are no swimmers, no docks. This bright white expanse is a flat plain of waste that slumped into the water when a retaining wall collapsed many years ago. A white pavement of settled waste extends far out from shore, barely under water. The smooth shelf is punctuated by cobble-sized rocks, ghostly beneath the water, unlike any rock you know. These are s, accretions of , that pepper the lake bottom. Oncolites—tumorous rocks."

"The waste beds continue to leach tons of salt into the lake every year. Before the Allied Chemical Company, successor to Solvay Process, ceased operation, the salinity of Onondaga Lake was ten times the salinity of the headwaters of Nine Mile Creek. The salt, the oncolites, and the waste impede the growth of rooted aquatic plants. Lakes rely on their submerged plants to generate oxygen by photosynthesis. Without plants, the depths of Onondaga Lake are oxygen-poor, and without swaying beds of vegetation, fish, frogs, insects, herons—the whole food chain—are left without habitat. While rooted water plants have a hard time, floating algae flourish in Onondaga Lake. For decades high quantities of nitrogen and phosphorous from municipal sewage fertilized the lake and fueled their growth. Algae blooms cover the surface of the water, then die and sink to the bottom. Their decay depletes what little oxygen is in the water and the lake begins to smell of the dead fish that wash up on shore on hot summer days."

"The fish that survive, you may not eat. Fishing was banned in 1970 due to high concentrations of mercury. It is estimated that one hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds of mercury were discharged into Onondaga Lake between 1946 and 1970. Allied Chemical used the mercury cell process to produce industrial chlorine from the native salt brines. The mercury waste, which we know to be extremely toxic, was handled freely on its way to disposal in the lake. Local people recall that a kid could make good pocket money on "reclaimed" mercury. One old-timer told me that you could go out to the waste beds with a kitchen spoon and pick up the small glistening spheres of mercury that lay on the ground. A kid could fill an old canning jar with mercury and sell it back to the company for the price of a movie ticket. Inputs of mercury were sharply curtailed in the 1970s, but the mercury remains trapped in the sediments where, when methylated, it can circulate through the aquatic food chain. It is estimated that seven million cubic yards of lake sediments are today contaminated with mercury."

"Swimming was banned in 1940. Beautiful Onondaga Lake. People spoke of it with pride. Now they barely speak of it at all, as if it were a family member whose demise was so shameful that the name never comes up."

"The blue of Titicaca is peculiar, not deep and dark as that of the tropical ocean, nor opaque like the blue of , nor like that warm purple of the Aegean which Homer compares to dark red wine, but a clear, cold, crystalline blue, even as is that of the cold skye vaulted over it. Even in the blazing sunlight it had that sort of chilly glitter one sees in the crevasses of a glacier; and the wavelets sparkled like diamonds."

"The lake itself functions almost as a closed system; its only outflow river under the present hydrological situation accounts for less than 5 % of the total water losses. The lake water is subject to strong evaporation, has a of the order of 63 years and has a total dissolved salt content of close to one gram per liter, which distinguishes it from the much fresher waters of the majority of the Andean mountain lakes. ... In addition to its unusual features, it is, according to , one of the birthplaces of mankind. The sun, the moon and the stars were born within its bounds according to the wishes of , creator of the world. Here, after the , mankind took its first steps. The lake was a sacred site for the , who saw it as the end of the earth and a point of fusion where the two concepts of time and space came to be expressed."

"Lake Titicaca is one of the world’s great sights. A vast inland sea improbably located in the sky. If it were in Europe, its surface would be above all the highest peaks in Switzerland and Austria, and its area would measure more than twice the size of all their lakes combined. ... ... If Titicaca was never a serious contender as the source of the Amazon (it’s in the mountains to the north), it is the cultural heart for Indigenous people."

"s are an important feature of the landscape of many regions of the world. Despite their , and form the cornerstone of multimillion-dollar minerals industries. Scientific investigation of saline lacustrine environments in many parts of the world, extends back over 100 years, although segmented disciplinary research contributed to generally slow progress in our understanding of salt lakes throughout most of the 20th century. Only during the past several decades has effort been directed toward unravelling the complexities of various interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes in modern salt lake systems. Modern salt lakes exhibit tremendous diversity in terms of , morphology, chemistry, and sedimentary processes. While most of today’s salt lake basins are small and shallow, and many exhibit playa characteristics, noteworthy also are the giant saline lacustrine basins. Unlike the marine setting, , with virtually every water chemistry type represented, often within the same geographic region. Associated with this large range in brine chemistry is an equally diverse assemblage of endogenic and authigenic minerals found in salt lakes."

"The ’s magisterial salt lakes — found in Oregon, Nevada, Utah and — feel precarious and unlikely, and indeed may not exist for long. In “Salt Lakes,” the journalist and critic Caroline Tracey recalls being first struck by them in 2014: “The lakes’ beauty captivated me,” she writes, “and their strangeness piqued my curiosity”; their palettes “of glistening blue water, white salt crusts, green wetland edges and and emerald microbial life turned the horizon into a painting.”"

"The in is an immense hyperarid intramontane basin with flat vast s and s on the . The central basin is about 2800–2900 elevation and enclosed by mountain ranges reaching > 5800 m in the and > 6200 m in the eastern . The extensive playas of the basin are covered by or with very subordinate additional solids. In this contribution we report on the chemical composition of salt lakes and inflows to the Qaidam basin (analysis of 30 water samples collected in the summer of 2008 and 2009) together with the composition of 22 salt samples. Salt lakes and small salt ponds formed at topographic depressions. Some of the lakes cover > 300 km2 surface but are very shallow (1–2 m deep). Most salt lakes and salt ponds are NaCl dominated and contain typically 250–300 g kg−1 total dissolved solids (TDS). Some lakes are industrially used and produce , , and or are strongly modified by deep water produced in oil fields. Lakes along the borders to the high mountains are typically not fully saturated with halite. However, also these lakes lost most and are drastically enriched in and some lakes also in B and Li. The chemical development of the most natural salt lakes follows a path producing Ca-deficient water that ultimately precipitate Mg-bearing carbonates and chlorites in addition to halite upon evaporation. The salt lakes form by continuous and drastic evaporation of the waters supplied by the inflows to the lakes in the basin. All inflows carry considerable amounts of Cl and are characterized by very high Cl/ ratios."