Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/59



an atmosphere of crimson and gold and purple most singularly beautiful."

In all my former experience in this region of startling novelties I had never seen any thing to equal what I witnessed that night. The air was warm almost as a summer's night at home, and yet there were the icebergs and the bleak mountains, with which the fancy, in this land of green hills and waving forests, can associate nothing but cold repulsiveness. The sky was bright and soft and strangely inspiring as the skies of Italy. The bergs had wholly lost their chilly aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of burnished metal or solid flame. Nearer at hand they were huge blocks of Parian marble, inlaid with mammoth gems of pearl and opal. One in particular exhibited the perfection of the grand. Its form was not unlike that of the Coliseum, and it lay so far away that half its height was buried beneath the line of blood-red waters. The sun, slowly rolling along the horizon, passed behind it, and it seemed as if the old Roman ruin had suddenly taken fire.

Nothing indeed but the pencil of the artist could depict the wonderful richness of this sparkling fragment of Nature. Church, in his great picture of "The Icebergs," has grandly exhibited a scene not unlike that which I would in vain describe.

In the shadows of the bergs the water was a rich green, and nothing could be more soft and tender than the gradations of color made by the sea shoaling on the sloping tongue of a berg close beside us. The tint increased in intensity where the ice overhung the water, and a deep cavern near by exhibited the solid color of the malachite mingled with the transpa