But fate spares not that suggestion to the able and the unlucky at their
task of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the traffick of
life.

The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the means
of our lives those which we should wish to see open to the sun, with
their waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they are
lapped in lead.

King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.

Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods. The hiding-place
that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, at
their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is so
visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to
think of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all charged
with shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying
that remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness. Not a
pool without this visitant, or without passages of stars. As for the
wells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as the
daily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter
fitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those
deeps.

Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun is
shattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken across stones,
and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall through
chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves. To
all these waters the agile air has perpetual access. Not so can great
towns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely the