458 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
ribbed ice/' looked forward to the time, when once more on their 
own element, they would listen to the shrill whistle,, 
“ Which doth order give 
To sounds confus’d, and mark the threaden sails, 
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind, 
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow’d sea, 
Breasting the lofty surge.” 
Early in the morning' of the 25th, Commander Ross took an 
excursion into the country, for the purpose of gathering flowers, 
catching insects and butterflies, or any other object of natural 
history, that might fall in his way: his success in those depart¬ 
ments was not, however, very great; nor could it be expected 
that Flora would be very lavish of her beauties in a hyperborean 
region, or that Nature would deck the few “ winged inhabitants 
of the air,” with all the gaudy dies and glittering hues, which 
delight the eye in tropical climes. Here, there was no roaming 
at liberty in the sun-lit fields, and sequestered dells, where the 
modest primrose, the golden buttercup, the splendid foxglove, 
the dancing daffodil, and the sweet-scented violet are profusely 
scattered. Here, you could not lie at your length at mid-day, 
on the side of the broad-breasted mountain, purple with heath 
flower, entranced with silent extacy ; or sit on a shady bank, 
gazing on the earliest primrose of the year, with admiring 
wonder, or bend in a retired nook, with intensity of interest, 
over the blue minute flower of the forget-me-not. No: here 
Nature was seated on her throne of sterility, in the very verge of 
her empire ; some tiny flower, to which all odour was denied, 
and pale and faint in colours, peeped through some crevice of a 
rock, shrinking from the sullen blast, which at times swept over 
it, and apparently conscious of the brevity of its existence. 
Some stinted blades of grass, which had borne the weight of the 
snow of an arctic winter, shot forth their spiral heads in lonely 
tufts, yielding to the hare its scanty food, but forbidden by 
nature to bear a seed. The pilgrim in the Steppes of Siberia,. 
