With news of human kind.’
The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart, was never more finely expressed than it is here.
The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night—of the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the return of spring in Lapland—
‘Where pure Niemi’s fairy mountains rise,
And fring’d with roses Tenglio rolls his stream,’
is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller lost in the snow, is a well-known and admirable dramatic episode. I prefer, however, giving one example of our author’s skill in painting common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison with the style of some later writers on such subjects. It is of little consequence what passage we take. The following description of the first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasing as any.
‘Through the hush’d air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin wav’ring, till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherish’d fields