REFRACTION. 
67 
Voyagers speak of the effects of Arctic refraction in 
language as exact and mathematical as their own cor- 
rection tables. It almost seems as if their minute ob- 
servations of dip-sectors and repeating-circles had left 
them no scope for picturesque sublimity. This may 
excuse a literal transcript from my diary, which runs 
perhaps into the other extreme. 
'■'■Friday, 11 P.M. A strip of horizon, commencing 
about 8° to the east of the sun, and between it and 
the land, resembled an extended plain, covered with 
the debris of ruined cities. No eifort of imagination 
was necessary for me to travel from the true watery 
horizon to the false one of refraction above it, and 
there to see huge structures lining an aerial ocean- 
margin. Some of rusty, Egyptian, rubbish-clogged 
propyla, and hypsethral courts — some tapering and 
columnar, like Palmyra and Baalbec — some with 
architrave and portico, like Telmessus or Athens, or 
else vague and grotto-like, such as dreamy memories 
recalled of EUora and Carli. 
" I can hardly realize it as I write ; but it was no 
trick of fancy. The things were there half an hour 
ago. I saw them, capricious, versatile, full of forms, 
but bright and definite as the phases of sober life. 
And as my eyes ran round upon the marvelous aaid 
varying scene, every one of these well-remembered 
cities rose before me, built up by some suggestive feat- 
ure of the ice. 
" An iceberg is one of God's own buildings, preaching 
its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of 
man. Its material, one colossal Pentelicus ; its mass, 
the representative of power in repose ; its distribution, 
simulating every architectural type. It makes one 
smile at those classical remnants which our own pe- 
