What Mark Twain thought of Lake Tahoe:

. 

'[Samuel] Clemens described Lake Tahoe as “a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the seas and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft a full three thousand feet higher still! It is a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole world affords.”

'After supper that night the boys broke out their pipes.  It was a glorious experience, “As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirrors with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and pains.” 

'Clemens, known later, of course, as Mark Twain, ' would travel the world visiting the most famous sights, but he always considered Tahoe the most beautiful lake of all, the "masterpiece of the universe." '

From Sierra Stories True Tales of Tahoe Volume 2, by Mark McLaughlin 
Posted by Kay Ebeling
The City of Angels Is Everywhere