Page:The ocean and its wonders.djvu/133

 summer; and that the sun, as if to make amends for its prolonged absence in winter, shines all night as well as all day, blazing on the crystal icebergs and pure snow (which never disappear from those seas) with a degree of splendour that renders the far north transcendently beautiful and pre-eminently attractive.

We admit freely that the prevailing character of arctic seas, during the greater part of the year, is dark, gloomy, forbidding. But this is the very reason why their brief but cheering smiles should be brought prominently into the foreground, and, if they cannot in justice be dwelt on long, at least be touched upon with emphasis.

Why, in some of our cyclopædia accounts of the realms of "thick-ribbed ice," so much prominence is given to "the horrors and wide desolation of the scene," and so much graphic power is expended in working up the reader's imagination to a conception of the dreadful dangers and the appalling terrors that await the madman who should dare to venture within the arctic circle, that persons who have not been there might well be tempted to shrink in affright from the very contemplation of a region in which there does not appear to be one redeeming quality.

We repeat, that we do not think the one side of the picture has been too darkly painted,but the other side has been painted too slightly.

At the same time, we would caution our readers