122 AWFULLY GRAND SCENE. 



and I wish I could in this place communicate 

 to the reader any just conception of it, but I am 

 utterly at a loss for words in which to embody 

 its description. 



No language, I am convinced, can convey an 

 adequate idea of the terrific grandeur of the 

 effect now produced by the collision of the ice 

 and the tempestuous ocean. The sea, violently 

 agitated and rolling its mountainous waves against 

 an opposing body is at all times a sublime and 

 awful sight ; but when, in addition, it encoun- 

 ters immense masses, which it has set in motion 

 with a violence equal to its own, its effect is 

 prodigiously increased. At one moment it bursts 

 upon these icy fragments, and buries them many 

 feet beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoy- 

 ancy of the depressed body struggles for reascend- 

 ancy, the water rushes in foaming cataracts over 

 its edges ; whilst every individual mass, rocking 

 and labouring in its bed, grinds against and con- 

 tends with its opponent until one is either split 

 with the shock or upheaved upon the surface of 

 the other. Nor is this collision confined to any 

 particular spot ; it is going on as far as the 

 sight can reach ; and when from this convul- 

 sive scene below, the eye is turned to the extra- 

 ordinary appearance of the blink in the sky 

 above, where the unnatural clearness of a calm 



