Form'd of the frost-gems ages labour forth
The mountains of hard and perfect ice are the gradual production, perhaps, of many centuries.—Leslie's Polar Seas and Regions.
Here did the venturous Ithacan explore.
Ulysses. Odys., lib. xi.
And, with the birth of fairy forests rife,
Blushes the world of white.
The phenomenon of the red snow on the Arctic mountains is formed by innumerable vegetable bodies; and the olive green of the Greenland Sea by Medusan animalcules, the number of which Mr. Scoresby illustrates by supposing that 80,000 persons would have been employed since the creation in counting it.—See Leslie.