Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/486

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thing so fully exhibiting the principles of glacier movement or so forcibly illustrating the river-like character of the crystal stream. To scale the glacier further was not in my power; but the eye climbed up, step by step, through the mountain-pass to the giddy summit, and as the imagination wandered from this icy pinnacle over sea and mountain, it seemed to me that the world did not hold any more impressive evidence of the greatness and the power of the Almighty hand; and I thought how feeble were all the efforts of man in comparison. As I turned away and commenced my descent, I found myself repeating these lines of Byron, penned as his poet-fancy wandered up the ice-girdled steeps and over the ice-crowned summits of the Alps:—

" these are The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity."