CONTINUOUS DAYLIGHT. 149 
gined with glaciers, and jutting out in capes from the 
clifFed shore : there is the still blue water. Or, if you 
want action instead of repose, here is the crashing floe, 
the grinding hummock, and the monumental berg ris- 
ing above both ! itself, though perishable, a seeming 
permanency compared with the ephemeral ruins that 
beat against its sides. 
All this is attempered by the warm glazing of a tint- 
ed atmosphere. The sky of Baffin's Bay, though but 
eight hundred miles from the Polar limit of all north- 
ernness, is as warm as the Bay of Naples after a June 
rain. What artist, then, could give this mysterious 
union of warm atmosphere and cold landscape ? 
The perpetual daylight had continued up to this 
moment with unabated glare. The sun had reached 
his north meridian altitude some days before, but the 
eye was hardly aware of change. Midnight had a 
softened character, like the low summer's sun at home, 
but there was no twilight. 
At first the novelty of this great unvarying day 
made it pleasing. It was curious to see the " mid- 
night Arctic sun set into sunrise," and pleasant to find 
that, whether you ate or slept, or idled or toiled, the 
same daylight was always there. No irksome night 
forced upon you its system of compulsory alternations. 
I could dine at midnight, sup at breakfast-time, and 
go to bed at noonday ; and but for an apparatus of 
coils and cogs, called a watch, would have been no 
wiser and no worse. 
My feeling was at first an extravagant sense of un- 
defined relief, of some vague restraint removed. I 
seemed to have thrown ofi" the slavery of hours. In 
fact, I could hardly realize its entirety. The astral 
lamps, standing, dust-covered, on our lookers — I am 
