Yes, on that dark night, with that wild unsteady north wind howling,
though it was May time, it was doubtless dismal enough in the forest,
where the boughs clashed eerily, and where, as the wanderer in that place
hurried along, strange forms half showed themselves to him, the more
fearful because half seen in that way: dismal enough doubtless on wide
moors where the great wind had it all its own way: dismal on the rivers
creeping on and on between the marsh-lands, creeping through the willows,
the water trickling through the locks, sounding faintly in the gusts of
the wind.

Yet surely nowhere so dismal as by the side of that still pool.

I threw myself down on the ground there, utterly exhausted with my
struggle against the wind, and with bearing the fathoms and fathoms of
the heavily-leaded plumb-line that lay beside me.

Fierce as the rain was, it could not raise the leaden waters of that
fearful pool, defended as they were by the steep banks of dripping yellow
clay, striped horribly here and there with ghastly uncertain green and
blue.

They said no man could fathom it; and yet all round the edges of it grew
a rank crop of dreary reeds and segs, some round, some flat, but none
ever flowering as other things flowered, never dying and being renewed,
but always the same stiff array of unbroken reeds and segs, some round,
some flat. Hard by me were two trees leafless and ugly, made, it seemed,
only for the wind to go through with a wild sough on such nights as
these; and for a mile from that place were no other trees.

True, I could not see all this at that time, then, in the dark night, but