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BEAUTY OF THE ICEBERGS. 25 



an atmosphere of crimson and gold and purple most 

 singularly beautiful." 



In all my former experience in this region of start- 

 ling novelties I had never seen any thing to equal 

 what I witnessed that night. The air was warm al- 

 most as a summer's night at home, and yet there were 

 the icebergs and the bleak mountains, with which the 

 fancy, in this land of green hills and waving forests, 

 can associate nothing but cold repulsiveness. The 

 sky was bright and soft and strangely inspiring as the 

 skies of Italy. The bergs had wholly lost their chilly 

 aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant 

 heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of bur- 

 nished metal or solid flame. Nearer at hand they 

 were huge blocks of Parian marble, inlaid with mam- 

 moth gems of pearl and opal. One in particular ex- 

 hibited the perfection of the grand. Its form was not 

 nlike that of the Coliseum, and it lay so far away 

 that half its height was buried beneath the line of 

 blood-red waters. The sun, slowly rolling along the 

 horizon, passed behind it, and it seemed as if the old 

 Roman ruin had suddenly taken fire. 



Nothing indeed but the pencil of the artist could 

 depict the wonderful richness of this sparkling frag- 

 ment of Nature. Church, in his great picture of " The 

 Icebergs," has grandly exhibited a scene not unlike 

 that which I would in vain describe. 



In the shadows of the bergs the water was a rich 

 green, and nothing could be more soft and tender 

 than the gradations of color made by the sea shoaling 

 on the sloping tongue of a berg close beside us. The 

 tint increased in intensity where the ice overhung 

 the water, and a deep cavern near by exhibited the 

 solid color of the malachite mingled with the transpa- 



