Anticipation

And glorious there, without a sound, Across the glimmering lake, High in the Valais-depth profound, I saw the morning break. -Matthew Arnold, Obermann Once More, 1867

Blue Bosom

Is it not better, then, to be alone,     And love Earth only for its earthly sake?     By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone,     Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,     Which feeds it as a mother who doth make     A fair but froward infant her own care,     Kissing its cries away as these awake--     Is it not better thus our lives to wear, Than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear? -Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Canto the Third, 1816

Contemplation

Here are the Alpine landscapes which create     A fund for contemplation; to admire     Is a brief feeling of a trivial date;       But something worthier do such scenes inspire:     Here to be lonely is not desolate,     For much I view which I could most desire,     And, above all, a lake I can behold Lovelier, not dearer, than our own of old. -Lord Byron, Epistle to Augusta, 1816

Heaven in the Lake

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake. -William Wordsworth, There was a Boy, 1800

Liquid Fire

He lights--if it were land that ever burn'd With solid, as the lake with liquid fire, And such appear'd in hue as when the force Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter'd side Of thund'ring Ætna, whose combustible And fuell'd entrails, thence conceiving fire, Sublim'd with mineral fury, aid the winds, -John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book I, 1667

Lake of Fire

With Arthur's vows on the great lake of fire. Tuwhoo! do ye see it? do ye see the star?" -Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament, 1871

Stillness

Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face, The mirror where the stars and mountains view The stillness of their aspect in each trace Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue: -Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Canto the Third, 1816