We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,

A pavement of pearl,

Singing, 'Here came a mortal,

But faithless was she,

And alone dwell for ever

The kings of the sea.'

But, children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low :
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starred with broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanched sands a gloom;
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.

We will gaze from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town;

At the church on the hill-side

And then come back down.

Singing

There dwells a loved one

But cruel is she!

She left lonely for ever

The kings of the sea.'

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

SPITZBERGEN.

By dint of sailing north whenever the ice would permit us, and sailing west whenever we could not sail north, we found ourselves on the 2d of August in the latitude of the southern

extremity of Spitzbergen, though divided from the land by about fifty miles of ice. All this while the weather had been pretty good, foggy, and cold enough, but with a fine stiff breeze that rattled us along at a good rate whenever we did get a chance of making any northing. But lately it had come on to blow very hard, the cold became quite piercing, and what was worse, in every direction round the whole circuit of the horizon, except along its southern segment, a blaze of iceblink illuminated the sky. A more discouraging spectacle could not have met our eyes. The iceblink is a luminous appearance, reflected on the heavens from the fields of ice that still lie sunk beneath the horizon; it was, therefore, on this occasion an unmistakeable indication of the encumbered state of the sea in front of us.

I had turned in for a few hours of rest, and was already lost in a dream of deep, bewildering bays of ice, and gulfs where shifting shores offered to the eye every possible combination of uncomfortable scenery, without possible issue, when 'a voice in my dreaming ear' shouted 'Land!' and I woke to its reality. I need not tell you in what double quick time I tumbled up the companion, or with what greediness I feasted my eyes on that longed-for view,—the only sight, as I then thought, we were ever destined to enjoy of the mountains of Spitzbergen!

The whole heaven was overcast with a dark mantle of tempestuous clouds, that stretched down in umbrella-like points towards the horizon, leaving a clear space between their edge and the sea, illuminated by the sinister brilliancy of the iceblink. In an easterly direction the belt of unclouded atmosphere was etherealized to an indescribable transparency, and up into it there gradually grew-above this dingy line of starboard ice-a forest of thin lilac peaks, so faint, so pale, that, had it not been for the gem-like distinctness of their outline, one could have deemed them as unsubstantial as the spires of Fairyland. The beautiful vision proved only too transient; in one short half-hour mist and cloud had blotted

it all out, while a fresh barrier of ice compelled us to turn our backs on the very land we were striving to reach.

Although we were certainly upwards of sixty miles distant from the land when the Spitzbergen hills were first observed, the intervening space seemed infinitely less; but in those high latitudes the eye is constantly liable to be deceived in the estimate it forms of distances. Often from some change suddenly taking place in the state of the atmosphere, the land you approach will appear even to recede; and on one occasion an honest skipper, one of the most valiant and enterprising mariners of his day, actually turned back because, after sailing for several hours with a fair wind towards the land, and finding himself no nearer to it than at first, he concluded that some loadstone rock beneath the sea must have attracted the keel of his ship, and kept her stationary.

The next five days were spent in a continual struggle with the ice. On the sixth, matters began to look a little brighter. The preceding four-and-twenty hours we had remained enveloped in a cold and dismal fog. But on coming on deck I found the sky had already begun to clear; and although there was ice as far as the eye could see on either side of us, in front a narrow passage showed itself across a patch of loose ice, into what seemed a free sea beyond. The only consideration was, whether we could be certain of finding our way out again, should it turn out that the open water we saw was only a basin without any exit in any other direction. The chance was too tempting to throw away; so the little schooner gallantly pushed her way through the intervening neck of ice, where the floes seemed to be least huddled up together, and in half an hour afterwards found herself running up along the edge of the starboard ice, almost in a due northerly direction.

Soon after the sun came out, the mist entirely disappeared, and again on the starboard hand shone a vision of land; this time not in the sharp peaks and spires we had first seen, but in a chain of pale-blue, egg-shaped islands, floating in the air

a long way above the horizon. This peculiar appearance was the result of extreme refraction, for later in the day we had an opportunity of watching the oval cloud-like forms gradually harden into the same pink tapering spikes which originally caused the island to be called Spitzbergen; nay, so clear did it become, that even the shadows on the hills became quite distinct, and we could easily trace the outlines of the enormous glaciers-sometimes ten or fifteen miles broad—that fill up every valley along the shore. Towards evening the line of coast again vanished into the distance, and our rising hopes received an almost intolerable disappointment by the appearance of a long line of ice right ahead, running to the westward, apparently, as far as the eye could reach. To add to our disgust, the wind flew right round into the north, and, increasing to a gale, brought down upon us, not one of the usual thick arctic mists, to which we were accustomed, but a dark yellowish-brown fog, that rolled along the surface of the water in twisted columns, and irregular masses of vapour, as dense as coal smoke. We had now almost reached the eightieth parallel of north latitude, and still an impenetrable sheet of ice extended fifty or sixty miles westward from the shore. Our expectation of finding the north-west extremity of the island disengaged from ice by the action of the currents, was-at all events for this season -evidently doomed to disappointment. We were already almost in the latitude of Amsterdam Island, which is actually its north-west point, and the coast seemed more encumbered than ever. No whaler had ever succeeded in getting more than about 120 miles farther north than we had already come; and to entangle ourselves any further in the ice, unless it were with the certainty of reaching land, would be sheer folly. The only thing to be done was to turn back. Accordingly, to this course I determined at last to resign myself, if, after standing on for twelve hours longer, nothing should turn up to improve the present aspect of affairs. It was now eleven o'clock P.M.; Fitz and Sigurdr went to bed,

while I remained on deck to see what the night might bring forth. It blew great guns, and the cold was perfectly intolerable; billow upon billow of black fog came sweeping down between the sea and sky, as if it were going to swallow up the whole universe; while the midnight sun-now completely blotted out, now faintly struggling through the ragged breaches of the mist-threw down from time to time an unearthly red-brown glare on the waste of roaring waters. For the whole of that night did we continue beating up along the edge of the ice, in the teeth of a whole gale of wind; at last, about nine o'clock in the morning,—but two short hours before the moment at which it had been agreed we should bear up and abandon the attempt,—we came up with a long low point of ice, that had stretched farther to the westward than any we had yet doubled, and there, beyond, lay an open sea !-open not only to the northward and westward, but also to the eastward! You can imagine my excitement. "Turn the hands up, Mr. Wyse!' "Bout ship!' 'Down with the helm !' 'Helm a-lee!' Up comes the schooner's head to the wind, the sails flapping with the noise of thunder, blocks rattling against the deck, as if they wanted to knock their brains out, ropes dancing about in galvanized coils like mad serpents, and everything to an inexperienced eye in inextricable confusion; till gradually she pays off on the other tack, the sails stiffen into deal boards, the staysail sheet is let go, and, heeling over on the opposite side, again she darts forward over the sea like an arrow from the bow. 'Stand by to make sail!' 'Out all reefs!' (I could have carried sail to sink a man-of-war!) And away the little ship went, playing leap-frog over the heavy seas, and staggering under her canvas, as if giddy with the same joyful excitement which made my own heart thump so loudly.

In another hour the sun came out, the fog cleared away, and about noon, up again above the horizon, grew the pale lilac peaks, warming into a rosier tint as we approach. Ice