"A man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps." Just as we were congratulating ourselves upon the prospect of getting an appetite for breakfast among the Greenland hills, the wind began to show decided symptoms of weakness; and, after a succession of spasmodic efforts to recover itself, prolonged through the next four and twenty hours, it at length died away completely, and left us lying on the still waters, impatient and ill at ease. We were sadly disappointed; but the sun scattered the vapors which had hung so long about us, and, in the scene which broke out of the dissolving mist, we buried our vexation.
VIEW OF GREENLAND.
Greenland had been for some time regarded by my companions as a sort of myth; for, although frequently only a few miles from its coast, so thick and constant had been the clouds and fogs, that, except for a few brief minutes, it had been wholly hidden from our view. Here, however, it was at last, shaking off its cloud mantle, and standing squarely out before us in austere magnificence,—its broad valleys, its deep ravines, its noble mountains, its black, beetling cliffs, its frowning desolation.
AMONG THE ICEBERGS.
As the fog lifted and rolled itself up like a scroll over the sea to the westward, iceberg after iceberg burst into view, like castles in a fairy tale. It seemed, indeed, as if we had been drawn by some unseen hand into a land of enchantment, rather than that we had come of our own free will into a region of stern realities, in pursuit of stern purposes;—as if the elves of the North had, in sportive playfulness, thrown a veil about our eyes, and enticed us to the very "seat eternal of the gods." Here was the Valhalla of the sturdy Vikings; here the city of the sun-god Freyer,—Alfheim, with its elfin caves,—and Glitner, with its walls of gold and roofs of silver, and Gimle, more brilliant than the sun,—the home of the happy; and there, piercing the clouds, was Himinborg, the Celestial Mount, where the bridge of the gods touches Heaven.
It would be difficult to imagine a scene more solemnly impressive than that which was disclosed to us by the sudden change in the clouded atmosphere. From my diary I copy the following brief description of it:—
"Midnight.—I have just come below, lost in the wondrous beauty of the night. The sea is smooth as glass; not a ripple breaks its dead surface, not a breath of air stirring. The sun hangs close upon the northern horizon; the fog has broken up into light clouds; the icebergs lie thick about us; the dark headlands stand boldly out against the sky; and the clouds and sea and bergs and mountains are bathed in an atmosphere of crimson and gold and purple most singularly beautiful."
BEAUTY OF THE ICEBERGS.
In all my former experience in this region of startling novelties I had never seen any thing to equal what I witnessed that night. The air was warm almost as a summer's night at home, and yet there were the icebergs and the bleak mountains, with which the fancy, in this land of green hills and waving forests, can associate nothing but cold repulsiveness. The sky was bright and soft and strangely inspiring as the skies of Italy. The bergs had wholly lost their chilly aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of burnished metal or solid flame. Nearer at hand they were huge blocks of Parian marble, inlaid with mammoth gems of pearl and opal. One in particular exhibited the perfection of the grand. Its form was not unlike that of the Coliseum, and it lay so far away that half its height was buried beneath the line of blood-red waters. The sun, slowly rolling along the horizon, passed behind it, and it seemed as if the old Roman ruin had suddenly taken fire.
Nothing indeed but the pencil of the artist could depict the wonderful richness of this sparkling fragment of Nature. Church, in his great picture of "The Icebergs," has grandly exhibited a scene not unlike that which I would in vain describe.