The reader will have observed the marvelous change that had come over the face of Nature since the shadow of the night had passed away. Recalling those chapters which recount the gloom and silence of the Arctic night,—the death-like quiet which reigned in the endless darkness,—the absence of every living thing that could relieve the solitude of its terrors,—he will perhaps hardly have been prepared to see, without surprise, the same landscape covered with an endless blaze of light, the air and sea and earth teeming with life, the desert places sparkling with green, and brightening with flowers,—the mind finding everywhere some new object of pleasure, where before there was but gloom. The change of the Arctic winter to the Arctic summer is indeed the change from death to life; and the voice which speaks to the sun and the winds, and brings back the joyous day, is that same voice which said
"She is not dead, but sleepeth,"—
and the pulseless heart was made to throb again, and the bloom returned to the pallid cheek.
THE ARCTIC SUMMER.
There is truly a rare charm in the Arctic summer, especially if watched unfolding from the darkness, and followed through the growing warmth, until the snows are loosened from the hills and the fountains burst forth, and the feeble flower-growths spring into being, and the birds come back with their merry music; and then again as it passes away, under the dark shadow of a sunless sky,—the fountains sealing up, the hill-sides and valleys taking on again the white robes of winter and the stillness of the tomb, the birds in rapid flight with the retreating day, and the mantle of darkness settling upon the mountains, and overspreading the plain.
To describe the summer as I have before described the winter, and to attempt fully to picture in detail those features which give it such a striking contrast to the winter as is not seen in any other quarter of the world, would too far prolong this narrative; and I will therefore content myself with selecting from my diary such extracts as will show the progress of the season, and those occupations of myself and associates that bore upon the purposes which we had mainly in view.
June 22d.
It is just six months since I wrote, "The sun has reached to-day its greatest southern declination, and we have passed the Arctic midnight;" and now the sun has reached its greatest northern declination, and we have passed the Arctic noonday. Constant light has succeeded constant darkness, a bright and cheerful world has banished a painful solitude;—
"The winter is past and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come;"
and the long night which the glad day has succeeded is remembered as a strange dream.