THE WINTER NIGHT 439 



of packing ice. In the midst of this empty waste of white 

 there is but one httle dark spot, and that is the Fram. 



" But beneath this crust, hundreds of fathoms down, 

 there teems a world of checkered Hfe in all its chans^inQr 

 forms, a world of the same composition as ours, with the 

 same instincts, the same sorrows, and also, no doubt, the 

 same joys ; everywhere the same struggle for existence. 

 So it ever is. If we penetrate within even the hardest 

 shell we come upon the pulsations of life, however thick 

 the crust may be. 



" I seem to be sitting here in solitude listening to 

 the music of one of Nature's mighty harp-strings. Her 

 grand symphonies peal forth through the endless ages of 

 the universe, now in the tumultuous whirl of busy life, 

 now in the stiffening coldness of death, as in Chopin's 

 Funeral March; and we — we are the minute, invisible 

 vibrations of the strings in this mighty music of the 

 universe, ever changing, yet ever the same. Its notes 

 are worlds ; one vibrates for a longer, another for a 

 shorter period, and all in turn give way to new ones. . . . 



" The world that shall be ! . . . Again and again this 

 thought comes back to my mind. I gaze far on through 

 the ages. . . . 



" Slowly and imperceptibly the heat of the sun de- 

 clines, and the temperature of the earth sinks by equally 

 slow degrees. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, mill- 

 ions of years pass away, glacial epochs come and go, 

 but the heat still grows ever less ; little by little these 



