COLOURS IN SNOW AND WATER

Poietes. You, Halieus, must certainly have considered the causes which produce the colours of waters. The streams of our own island are of a very different colour from these mountain rivers, and why should the same element or substance assume such a variety of tints?

Halieus. I certainly have often thought upon the subject, and I have made some observations and one experiment in relation to it. I will give you my opinion with pleasure; and as far as I know, they have not been brought forward in any of the works on the properties of water, or on its consideration as a chemical element. The purest water with which we are acquainted, is undoubtedly that which falls from the atmosphere. Having touched air alone, it can contain nothing but what it gains from the atmosphere; and it is distilled without the chance of those impurities, which may exist in the vessels used in an artificial operation. We cannot well examine the water precipitated from the atmosphere, as rain, without collecting it in vessels, and all artificial contact, gives more or less of contamination; but in snow, melted by the sunbeams, that has fallen on glaciers, themselves formed from frozen snow, water may be regarded as in its state of greatest purity. Congelation expels both salts and air from water, whether existing below, or formed in, the atmosphere; and in the high and uninhabited regions of glaciers, there can scarcely be any substances to contaminate. Removed from animal and vegetable life, they are even above the mineral kingdom; and though there are instances in which the rudest kind of vegetation (of the fungus or mucor kind) is even found upon snows, yet this is a rare occurrence; and red snow, which is occasioned by it, is an extraordinary and not a common phenomenon towards the pole, and on the highest mountains of the globe. Having examined the water formed from melted snow on glaciers, in different parts of the Alps, and having always found it of the same quality, I shall consider it as pure water, and describe its character. Its colour, when it has any depth, or when a mass of it is seen through, is bright blue; and, according to its greater or less depth of substance, it has more or less of this colour; as its

insipidity, and its other physical qualities, are not at this moment objects of your inquiry, I shall not dwell upon them. In general in examining lakes and masses of water in high mountains, their colour is of the same bright azure. And Captain Barry states, that the water on the Polar ice has the like beautiful tint. When vegetables grow in lakes, the colour becomes nearer sea-green, and as the quantity of impregnation from their decay increases, greener, yellowish green, and at length when the vegetable extract is large in quantity, as in countries where peat is found, yellow and even brown. To mention instances, the Lake of Geneva, fed from sources (particularly the higher Rhone) formed from melting snow, is blue; and the Rhone pours from it dyed of the deepest azure, and retains partially this colour till it is joined by the Saone, which gives it a greener hue. The Lake of Morat, on the contrary, which is fed from a lower country, and from less pure sources, is grass green. And there is an illustrative instance in some small lakes fed from the same source, in the road from Inspruck to Stutgard, which I observed in 1815, (as well as I recollect) between Nazareit and Reiti. The highest lake fed by melted snows in March, when I saw it, was bright blue. It discharged itself by a small stream into another into which a number of large pines had been blown by a winter storm, or fallen from some other cause; in this lake its colour was blue-green. In a third lake, in which there were not only pines and their branches, but likewise other decaying vegetable matter, it had a tint of faded grass-green; and these changes had occurred in a space not much more than a mile in length. These observations I made in 1815; on returning to the same spot twelve years after, in August and September, I found the character of the lakes entirely changed. The pine wood washed into the second lake had disappeared; a large quantity of stones and gravel, washed down by torrents, or detached by an avalanche, supplied their place; there was no perceptible difference of tint in the two upper lakes; but the lower one, where there was still some vegetable matter, seemed to possess a greener hue. The same principle will apply to the Scotch and Irish rivers, which, when they rise or issue from pure rocky sources, are blue or bluish green; and when fed from peat bogs, or alluvial countries, yellow, or amber-coloured or brown, even after they have deposited a part of their impurities in great lakes. Sometimes, though rarely, mineral impregnations give colour to water; small streams are sometimes green or yellow

from ferruginous depositions. Calcareous matters seldom affect their colour, but often their transparency when deposited, as is the case with the Velino at Terni, and the Anio at Tivoli; but I doubt if pure saline matters, which are in themselves white, ever change the tint of water. (From the Same.)

WILLIAM HAZLITT

[William Hazlitt was born at Maidstone on the 10th April 1778. His father was a Unitarian minister of Irish extraction. The family went to America when the essayist was five years old, but soon returned and established itself at Wem, in Shropshire. Here Hazlitt, after an experience of two years at the theological college of his father's sect at Hackney, during which he convinced himself that he had no liking for the ministry, met Coleridge, and was much stimulated by the meeting (1798). He was at this time divided in taste between art and metaphysics; he went to Paris in 1802 (when the peace of Amiens opened the Continent) on a picture-copying errand, tried portrait-painting with little success, and next year published his essay on the Principles of Human Action, and began to live by the press. In 1808 he married Miss Stoddart, a friend of the Lambs, a lady of some little fortune and sister of the once well-known Sir John Stoddart. For some four years he lived at her property of Winterslow, on the edge of Salisbury Plain, a place which has left enduring traces on his writings. The household removed to London in 1812, Hazlitt taking to regular press-work of various kinds, and living in Milton's supposed house in York Street, Westminster. About ten years later he and his wife obtained a Scotch divorce, and he engaged in the singular love affair with a lodging-house keeper's daughter, Sarah Walker, which he has recorded in Liber Amoris. In 1824 he was married a second time to a widow of some property; but she left him very shortly afterwards, and he died on 18th September 1830, having during his latest years been engaged on his only large work, an extensive but not very valuable Life of Napoleon. The essays and lectures, by which after some delay his fame is being more and more solidly established, were published and delivered in various places and forms during the last twenty years of his life, the details of which are on the whole very scantily and imperfectly recorded. Most of Hazlitt's periodical writings were reprinted after his death by his son and grandson (the latter of whom has written a Life of him) and are now attainable in Bohn's Library; while an excellent selection from his works has been produced by Mr. Alexander Ireland; but a complete edition with due editorial apparatus is still wanting.]

THE character of Hazlitt's literary achievements is very peculiar ; and the history of his literary reputation is still more so. During his lifetime (which, as will have been noted, was comparatively short) he was the object of violent attack, which was no doubt

partly due to political prejudice, but which was strengthened, as his political and personal friends' defence of him was weakened, by many strange and unlovely peculiarities in his character. After his death, though his influence on a few literary persons was great, he could hardly be said to have much on the general reader; and it was something of a habit to regard him (most unjustly) as a Bohemian of some talent, who had chiefly shown the evils of Bohemianism. Of late years strenuous efforts have been made by persons who by no means agree in their general views either of literature or of politics to rehabilitate him; and these efforts have not been wholly without effect.

It is indeed not likely that Hazlitt will ever be a popular writer. Though he had a great talent for description, so that many of his fugitive pieces contain extraordinarily vivid and brilliant work, he was much more carried by his taste and temperament to criticism -criticism of art, of literature, of politics, of philosophy. And though critical writings may hold such a modest and obscure corner of the Temple of Fame as they do hold pretty securely, inasmuch as the principles which they apply are eternal and are sure to be recognised by later practitioners and enquirers in the same paths, the vogue thus secured is never likely to amount to popularity. Moreover Hazlitt, either by ill-luck or misjudgment, never gave himself a chance of attaching his apparently minor but really major works of comment and criticism to the popularity of some larger production. His Life of Napoleon, his single attempt of this kind, has been little, and never deserved to be much, read. He has also weighted himself with a positive, in addition to this negative and accidental drawback. He is, among English writers of great accomplishment, paramount for prejudice, unfairness, inequality of judgment. He was regarded in his own day by not unfriendly judges as a kind of Ishmael— an Ishmael too whose hand had been against every man long before he could complain of every man's hand being against him. As Lamb, his most familiar and most faithful friend said, he quarrelled with the world at a rate" which, as Lamb could hardly say, was practically insane. He was left by both his wives. He was more or less often at daggers drawn with every friend he had. He was suspected of being the instigator of at least one fatal duel of which he himself kept clear. He attacked, sometimes without the smallest and often with very small provocation, every prominent man of letters of the day, Whig and

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