576 FARTHEST NORTH 



between the present and the time to come, and let me 

 dream far, far ahead into the future. 



" O thou mysterious radiance ! what art thou, and 

 whence comest thou ? Yet why ask ? Is it not enough 

 to admire thy beauty and pause there ? Can we at best 

 get beyond the outward show of things ? What would 

 it profit even if we could say that it is an electric dis- 

 charge or currents of electricity through the upper re- 

 gions of the air, and were able to describe in minutest 

 detail how it all came to be ? It would be mere words. 

 We know no more what an electric current really is than 

 what the aurora borealis is. Happy is the child. . . . 

 We, with all our views and theories, are not in the last 

 analysis a hair's-breadth nearer the truth than it. 



"Tuesday, November 13th. Thermometer — 38° C. 

 (—36.4° Fahr.). The ice is packing in several quarters 

 during the day, and the roar is pretty loud, now that the 

 ice has become colder. It can be heard from afar — a 

 strange roar, which would sound uncanny to any one 

 who did not know what it was. 



" A delightful snow-shoe run in the light of the full 

 moon. Is life a vale of tears } Is it such a deplorable 

 fate to dash off like the wind, with all the dogs skipping 

 around one, over the boundless expanse of ice, through a 

 night like this, in the fresh, crackling frost, while the 

 snow-shoes glide over the smooth surface, so that you 

 scarcely know you are touching the earth, and the stars 

 hang high in the blue vault above } This is more, 



