232 TERRORS AND MYSTERIES OF THE POLAR REGION 



On the other hand, it may be conceded that the Arctic night 

 has its interesting and fascinating aspects for the cultivated mind, 

 when it can shake off the weight and oppression of the prolonged 

 silence and almost continual darkness. It has, as we have seen, its 

 glorious auroral phenomena, flooding land and sea with a many- 

 colored radiance, which may well recall "the consecration and the 

 poet's dream," for only in "poet's dream" could anything so 

 strangely beautiful have been imagined. Then there is a charm in 

 the keen, cold light of the stars, in the eery lustre which falls upon 

 the hills and icebergs, in the flashing whiteness of the snow- 

 shrouded mountain-peaks and majestic glaciers. 



"Nature," says Dr. Hayes, "is here exposed on a gigantic 

 scale;" that is, man stands so completely face to face with it, that 

 he feels himself dwarfed in its presence, and recognizes for the first 

 time the grandeur of its proportions. Out of the glassy sea rise 

 the dark fronts of lofty clips, flinging their shadows over the desert 

 of frozen waters. Mountain-summits, which foot of man has never 

 profaned, seem to pierce the very heavens, and lift to the stars their 

 virgin snows. In huge and massive floods the glaciers roll their 

 burden of the innumerable ages into the sea. "The very air, dis- 

 daining the gentle softness of other climes, bodies forth," says 

 Hayes, " a loftier majesty, and seems to fill the universe with a 

 boundless transparency; and the stars pierce it sharply, and the 

 moon fills it with a cold refulgence. There is neither warmth nor 

 coloring underneath this ethereal robe of night. No broad window 

 opens in the east, no gold and crimson curtain falls in the west, upon 

 a world clothed in blue, and green, and purple, melting into one 

 harmonious whole, a tinted cloak of graceful loveliness. Under the 

 shadow of the eternal night, Nature needs no drapery and requires 

 no adornment. The glassy sea, the tall cliff, the lofty mountain, 

 the majestic glacier, 'do not blend one witH the other. Each stands 

 forth alone, clothed only with Solitude. Sable priestess of the 

 Arctic winter, she has wrapped the world in a winding-sheet, and 

 thrown her web and woof over the very face of Nature." 



