e water got underneath
to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to
which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one
hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet
not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds
were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that
this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could
not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would
not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in
proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not
leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills;
for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a
vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.
Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we
frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates
to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch
Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty
or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles
long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it
immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature
occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it
have appeared!

"So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters."

But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times
as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch
Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching
cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the waters
have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the
geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often
an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the
low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been
necessary to conceal their history. But it is ea