A last word and I will close this letter. Several paces from the Falls, you explore a calcareous rock, which is very beautiful. In the midst of one of the quarries that are there a galley-slave, in stripes of grey and black, with pick-axe in his hand and a double chain on his feet, looked at the cataract. Chance seems to delight itself sometimes in placing in antitheses, sometimes sad and sometimes terrible, the work of nature and the work of society.
Le Rhin (Paris, 1846).
IN ARCTIC SEAS
LORD DUFFERIN
Ever since leaving England, as each four-and-twenty hours we climbed up nearer to the pole, the belt of dusk dividing day from day had been growing narrower and narrower, until having nearly reached the Arctic circle, this,—the last night we were to traverse,—had dwindled to a thread of shadow. Only another half-dozen leagues more, and we would stand on the threshold of a four months’ day! For the few preceding hours, clouds had completely covered the heavens, except where a clear interval of sky, that lay along the northern horizon, promised a glowing stage for the sun’s last obsequies. But like the heroes of old he had veiled his face to die, and it was not until he dropped down to the sea that the whole hemisphere overflowed with glory and the gilded pageant concerted for his funeral gathered in slow procession round his grave; reminding one of those tardy honours paid to some great prince of song, who—left during life to languish in a garret—is buried by nobles in Westminster Abbey. A few minutes more the last fiery segment had disappeared beneath the purple horizon, and all was over.
“The king is dead—the king is dead—the king is dead! Long live the king!” And up from the sea that had just entombed his sire, rose the young monarch of a new day; while the courtier clouds, in their ruby robes, turned faces still aglow with the favours of their dead lord, to borrow brighter blazonry from the smile of a new master.
A fairer or a stranger spectacle than the last Arctic sunset cannot be well conceived. Evening and morning—like kinsmen whose hearts some baseless feud has kept asunder—clasping hands across the shadow of the vanished night.
You must forgive me if sometimes I become a little magniloquent; for really, amid the grandeur of that fresh primæval world, it was almost impossible to prevent one’s imagination from absorbing a dash of the local colouring. We seemed to have suddenly waked up among the colossal scenery of Keats’s Hyperion. The pulses of young Titans beat within our veins. Time itself,—no longer frittered down into paltry divisions,—had assumed a more majestic aspect. We had the appetite of giants,—was it unnatural we should also adopt “the large utterance of the early gods”?
About 3 A. M. it cleared up a little. By breakfast-time the sun reäppeared, and we could see five or six miles ahead of the vessel. It was shortly after this, that as I was standing in the main rigging peering out over the smooth blue surface of the sea, a white twinkling point of light suddenly caught my eye about a couple of miles off on the port bow, which a telescope soon resolved into a solitary isle of ice, dancing and dipping in the sunlight. As you may suppose, the news brought everybody upon deck; and when almost immediately afterwards a string of other pieces—glittering like a diamond necklace—hove in sight, the excitement was extreme.
Here, at all events, was honest blue salt water frozen solid, and when—as we proceeded—the scattered fragments thickened, and passed like silver argosies on either hand, until at last we found ourselves enveloped in an innumerable fleet of bergs,—it seemed as if we could never be weary of admiring a sight so strange and beautiful. It was rather in form and colour than in size that these ice islets were remarkable; anything approaching to a real iceberg we neither saw, nor are we likely to see. In fact, the lofty ice mountains that wander like vagrant islands along the coast of America, seldom or never come to the eastward or northward of Cape Farewell. They consist of land ice, and are all generated among the bays and straits within Baffin’s Bay, and first enter the Atlantic a good deal to the southward of Iceland; whereas the Polar ice, among which we have been knocking about, is field ice, and—except when packed one ledge above another, by great pressure—is comparatively flat. I do not think I saw any pieces that were piled up higher than thirty or thirty-five feet above the sea-level, although at a little distance through the mist they may have loomed much loftier.