Essays

								

first hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which
we all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the second
lifted up the arches of the aqueduct.
The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way to
ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way.  In
all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden means
must needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity.  This
is easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain the ill-fortune
that presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, all
the ill-favoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them
serviceable and effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and inter
them, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily
world.  It is an added mischance.  Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to
explain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which are,
after all, only less expert ways of labour.  In those happy conditions,
neither from the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from the
workman looking askance at his unhandsome material, comes a first
proposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight.
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