Literature

“...You have a wonderfully beautiful face, [Lord Henry said to] Mr Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call moon.” 
(O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 2, pp. 45-46)

“...The water-surface, standing as interface between the phenomenal color-world and the noumenal non-color world, is never flatly opaque, but rather simultaneously partially opaque, partially reflective, and partially transparent. It is this protean analogical capacity of the water-mirror which makes it the central figure of intuition in Moby-Dick.”

(R. Zoellern, The salt-sea mastodon: a reading of Moby-Dick, p.44)