666 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
in that position, in which the cogitating powers are most suc¬ 
cessfully and efficaciously called into action. Silence is one of 
the great nurses of thought, and for a time the hum of busy 
man had ceased around him : and if he could have found any 
pleasure in the thought, he might have fancied himself another 
Alexander Selkirk—or the last man of creation—or even the 
wandering Jew, on whom the eternal curse had been pronounced, 
that he should ce walk on” for ever ; and that, by some mis¬ 
chance or act of ignorance, he had extended his walk as far as 
Fury Beach, although he perhaps could not there find any 
human happiness to blight with his pestiferous breath. Not 
more intensely was Newton absorbed in thought, when the 
apple fell, and the power of gravitation stood revealed to him, 
than was Capt. Ross, in his recumbent posture, pondering, 
perhaps, on the treasures, which he had left behind him, in the 
vicinity of Victory Harbour, or on the exact degree of longitude, 
in which he was to inform the Royal Society of London, that 
he had discovered the position of the magnetic pole: when lo! 
<—an unearthly sound struck upon his startled ears, which to his 
senses appeared as if it came from some object above him : 
but whether it was a benignant spirit of heaven, that had 
alighted from a sun-beam, to whisper strength and consolation 
to him in the darkness of his desolation ; or whether it was the 
dread spirit of futurity, that had come with the book of fate, to 
exhibit to him the page, on which Fame had inscribed his name 
in indelible characters, as one of the great ones of the earth, 
on whom immortality was to be bestowed—are momentous 
questions, which no one will be disposed to impute stupidity to 
Capt. Ross, on account of his incapability to solve them. The 
noise, however, increased, and the sound of footsteps was dis¬ 
tinctly heard, slow, stately, and solemn, and with a heaviness, 
as if some dreadful incubus were prowling on the roof, with a 
determination to work a passage through it, by the mere 
pressure of his ponderous frame. With knitted brow and 
agitated frame—with hair erect as that of the crooked-back 
tyrant, when awakening suddenly from his sleep, in which he 
had seen the ghosts of the murdered stalk before him—so did 
