History
There are still countless natural swimming places that meet this definition and many are still used. Efforts in recent years to clean up such bodies of water have actually resulted in cleaner water in many rivers and creeks and healthier natural places to swim.
In Europe, as the nineteenth century dawned, a new era of contemporary artists were rediscovering the appeal of the swimming hole. The waterfall, surrounded by trees and mountains, was now regarded as the quintessence of beauty. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey spent much time bathing in the mountain pools of the Lake District. The study and search for the ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’ – an almost scientific measure of loveliness and proportion in the landscape – had reached epidemic proportions. The fashionable tours of Provence or Tuscany were replaced by trips to the valleys of Wales, and the dales of the UK's Cumbria and Yorkshire, as Turner and Constable painted a prodigious flow of falls, tarns and ponds.
Read more about this topic: Swimming Hole
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)