MYTHOLOGY. 
177 
fiords, sometimes to the length of twenty, thirty, and 
even forty miles. Anything more grand and mysterious 
than the appearance of their solemn portals, as we 
passed across from bluff to bluff, it is impossible to con¬ 
ceive. Each might have served as a separate entrance 
to some poet’s hell—so drear and fatal seemed the vista 
one’s eye just caught receding between the endless ranks 
of precipice and pyramid. 
There is something, moreover, particularly mystical 
in the effect of the grey, dreamy atmosphere of an arctic 
night, through whose uncertain medium mountain and 
headland loom as impalpable as the frontiers of a 
demon world; and as I kept gazing at the glimmering 
peaks, and monstrous crags, and shattered stratifica¬ 
tions, heaped up along the coast in cyclopian disorder, 
I understood how natural it was that the Scandinavian 
mythology, of whose mysteries the Icelanders were 
ever the natural guardians and interpreters, should 
have assumed that broad, massive simplicity which is 
its most beautiful characteristic. Amid the rugged 
features of such a country the refinements of Paganism 
would have been dwarfed to insignificance. How 
out of place would seem a Jove with his beard in 
