108 LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. [VIII. 



as we passed across from bluff to bluff, it is impossible to 

 conceive. Each might have served as a separate entrance 

 to some poet's hell — so drear and fatal seemed the vista 

 one's eye just caught receding between the endless ranks of 

 precipice and pyramid. 



There is something, moreover, particularly mystical in 

 the effect of the grey, dreamy atmosphere of an arctic night, 

 through whose uncertain medium mountain and headland 

 loom as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world ; and 

 as I kept gazing at the glimmering peaks, and monstrous 

 crags, and shattered stratifications, heaped up along the coast 

 in cyclopean disorder, I understood how natural it was that 

 the Scandinavian mythology, of whose mysteries the Ice- 

 landers were ever the natural guardians and interpreters, 

 should have assumed that broad, massive simplicity which 

 is its most beautiful characteristic. Amid the rugged features 

 of such a country the refinements of Paganism would have 

 been dwarfed into insignificance. How out of place w r ould 

 seem a Jove with his beard in ringlets — a trim Apollo — a 

 sleek Bacchus — an ambrosial Venus — a slim Diana, and all 

 their attendant groups of Oreads and Cupids — amid the 

 ocean mists, and icebound torrents, the flame-scarred moun- 

 tains, and four months' night — of a land which the oppos- 

 ing forces of heat and cold have selected for a battle-field ! 



The undeveloped reasoning faculty is prone to attach an 

 undue value and meaning to the forms of things, and the 

 infancy of a nation's mind is always more ready to worship 

 the manifestations of a Power, than to look beyond them for 

 a cause. Was it not natural then that these northerns, dwell- 

 ing in daily communion with this grand Nature, should fancy 

 they could perceive a mysterious and independent energy in 

 her operations ; and at last come to confound the moral con- 

 test man feels within him, with the physical strife he finds 

 around him; to see in the returning sun — fostering into re- 

 newed existence the winter- stifled world — even more than a 

 type of that spiritual consciousness which alone can make the 

 dead heart stir ; to discover even more than an analogy be- 



