178 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
ringlets—a trim Apollo—a sleek Bacclms—an ambro¬ 
sial Venus—a slim Diana, and all their attendant groups 
of Oreads and Cupids—amid the ocean mists, and ice¬ 
bound torrents, the fire-scathed mountains, and four 
months’ night—of a land which the opposing forces 
of heat and cold have selected for a battle-field ! 
The undeveloped reasoning faculty is prone to 
attach an undue value and meaning to the forms of 
things, and the infancy of a nation’s mind is always 
more ready to worship the manifestations of a Power, 
than to look beyond them for a cause. Was it not 
natural then that these northerns, dwelling in daily 
communion with this grand primaeval Nature, should 
fancy they could perceive a mysterious and independent 
energy in her operations; and at last come to con¬ 
found the moral contest man feels within him, with 
the physical strife he finds around him; to see in 
the returning sun—fostering into renewed existence 
the winter-stifled world—even more than a type of 
that spiritual consciousness which alone can make 
the dead heart stir; to discover even more than an 
analogy between the reign of cold, darkness, and 
desolation, and the still blanker ruin of a sin-perverted 
