Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/266

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dark and drear solitude oppresses the understanding; the desolation which everywhere reigns haunts the imagination; the silence—dark, dreary, and profound—becomes a terror.

And yet there is in the Arctic night much that is attractive to the lover of Nature. There is in the flashing Aurora, in the play of the moonlight upon the hills and icebergs, in the wonderful clearness of the starlight, in the broad expanse of the ice-fields, in the lofty grandeur of the mountains and the glaciers, in the naked fierceness of the storms, much that is both sublime and beautiful. But they speak a language of their own,—a language, rough, rugged and severe.

Nature is here exposed on a gigantic scale. Out of the glassy sea the cliffs rear their dark fronts and frown grimly over the desolate waste of ice-clad waters. The mountain peaks, glittering in the clear cold atmosphere, pierce the very heavens, their heads hoary with unnumbered ages. The glaciers pour their crystal torrents into the sea in floods of immeasurable magnitude. The very air, disdaining the gentle softness of other climes, bodies forth a loftier majesty, and seems to fill the universe with a boundless transparency; and the stars pierce it sharply, and the moon fills it with a cold refulgence. There is neither warmth nor coloring underneath this etherial robe of night. No broad window opens in the east, no gold and crimson curtain falls in the west, upon a world clothed in blue and green and purple, melting into one harmonious whole, a tinted cloak of graceful loveliness. Under the shadow of the eternal night, Nature needs no drapery and requires no adornment. The glassy sea, the tall cliff, the lofty mountain, the