A faint twilight flush mounted the southern sky to-day at the meridian hour, and, although barely perceptible, it was a cheering sight to all of us.
At our usual Sunday gathering, I read from Ecclesiastes these lines:—
"Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eye to behold the sun."
And this suggested the text for our evening conversation; and we talked long of the future and of what was to be done, with the coming again of the god of day.
We all feel now that the veil of night is lifting, that the cloud is passing away, that the heavy load of darkness is being lightened. The people have exhausted their means of amusement; the newspaper has died a natural death; theatricals are impossible; and there is nothing new to break the weariness of the long hours.
But we shall soon have no need to give thought to these things. There will be ere long neither time nor occasion for amusements. The Arctic night will soon be numbered with the things of the past. We are eager that it shall have an end, and we long for the day and work.
And say what you will, talk as you will of pluck, and manly resolution, and mental resources, and all that sort of thing, this Arctic night is a severe ordeal. Physically one can get through it well enough. We are and always have been in perfect health. I am my own "ship's doctor," and am a doctor without a patient. Believing in Democritus rather than Heraclitus, we have laughed the scurvy and all other sources of ill-health to shame. And we have laughed at the scurvy really and truly; for if it does sometimes come in, like a thief in the night, with salt rations and insufficient food, which has not been our portion, it does, too, come with despondency and the splenetic blood of an unhappy household, from which we have fortunately been exempt.
But if the Arctic night can be endured with little strain upon the physical, it is, nevertheless, a severe trial both to the moral and the intellectual faculties. The darkness which so long clothes Nature unfolds to the senses a new world, and the senses accommodate themselves to that world but poorly. The cheering influences of the rising sun which invite to labor; the soothing influences of the evening twilight which invite to repose; the change from day to night find from night to day which lightens the burden to the weary mind and the aching body, strengthening the hope and sustaining the courage, in the great life-battle of the dear home-land, is withdrawn, and in the constant longing for Light, Light, the mind and body, weary with the changeless progress of the time, fail to find Repose where all is Rest. The grandeur of Nature ceases to give delight to the dulled sympathies. The heart longs continually for new associations, new objects, and new companionships. The dark and drear solitude oppresses the understanding; the desolation which everywhere reigns haunts the imagination; the silence—dark, dreary, and profound—becomes a terror.
And yet there is in the Arctic night much that is attractive to the lover of Nature. There is in the flashing Aurora, in the play of the moonlight upon the hills and icebergs, in the wonderful clearness of the starlight, in the broad expanse of the ice-fields, in the lofty grandeur of the mountains and the glaciers, in the naked fierceness of the storms, much that is both sublime and beautiful. But they speak a language of their own,—a language, rough, rugged and severe.
Nature is here exposed on a gigantic scale. Out of the glassy sea the cliffs rear their dark fronts and frown grimly over the desolate waste of ice-clad waters. The mountain peaks, glittering in the clear cold atmosphere, pierce the very heavens, their heads hoary with unnumbered ages. The glaciers pour their crystal torrents into the sea in floods of immeasurable magnitude. The very air, disdaining the gentle softness of other climes, bodies forth a loftier majesty, and seems to fill the universe with a boundless transparency; and the stars pierce it sharply, and the moon fills it with a cold refulgence. There is neither warmth nor coloring underneath this etherial robe of night. No broad window opens in the east, no gold and crimson curtain falls in the west, upon a world clothed in blue and green and purple, melting into one harmonious whole, a tinted cloak of graceful loveliness. Under the shadow of the eternal night, Nature needs no drapery and requires no adornment. The glassy sea, the tall cliff, the lofty mountain, the majestic glacier, do not blend one with the other. Each stands forth alone, clothed only with Solitude. Sable priestess of the Arctic winter, she has wrapped the world in a winding-sheet, and thrown her web and woof over the very face of Nature.