224 THE ARCTIC NIGHT. 



dark and drear solitude oppresses the understanding ; 

 the desolation which everywhere reigns haunts the 

 imagination ; the silence — dark, dreary, and pro- 

 found — becomes a terror. 



And yet there is in the Arctic night much that is 

 attractive to the lover of Nature. There is in the 

 flashing Aurora, in the play of the moonlight upon 

 the hills and icebergs, in the wonderful clearness of 

 the starlight, in the broad expanse of the ice-fields, in 

 the lofty grandeur of the mountains and the glaciers, 

 in the naked fierceness of the storms, much that is 

 both sublime and beautiful. But they speak a lan- 

 guage of their own, — a language, rough, rugged 

 and severe. 



Nature is here exposed on a gigantic scale. Out 

 of the glassy sea the cliffs rear their dark fronts and 

 frown grimly over the desolate waste of ice-clad 

 waters. The mountain peaks, glittering in the clear 

 cold atmosphere, pierce the very heavens, their heads 

 hoary with unnumbered ages. The glaciers pour 

 their crystal torrents into the sea in floods of immeas- 

 urable magnitude. The very air, disdaining the gen- 

 tle softness of other climes, bodies forth a loftier maj- 

 esty, 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 etherial 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 love- 

 liness. Under the shadow of the eternal night, Na- 

 ture needs no drapery and requires no adornment. 

 The glassy sea, the tall cliff, the lofty mountain, the 



