A Fairer Or A Stranger Spectacle Than The Last Arctic
Sunset Cannot Well Be Conceived:
Evening and Morning - like
kinsmen whose hearts some baseless feud has kept asunder
- clasping hands across the shadow of the vanished night.
You must forgive me if sometimes I become a little
magniloquent; - for really, amid the grandeur of that
fresh primaeval world, it was almost impossible to prevent
one's imagination from absorbing a dash of the local
colouring. We seemed to have suddenly waked up among
the colossal scenery of Keats' Hyperion. The pulses of
young Titans beat within our veins. Time itself, - no
longer frittered down into paltry divisions, - had assumed
a more majestic aspect. We had the appetite of giants - was
it unnatural we should also adopt "the large utterance
of the early gods?"
As the "Reine Hortense" could not carry coals sufficient
for the entire voyage we had set out upon, it had been
arranged that the steamer "Saxon" should accompany her
as a tender, and the Onunder Fiord, on the north-west
coast of the island, had been appointed as the place of
rendezvous. Suddenly wheeling round therefore to the
right we quitted the open sea, and dived down a long grey
lane of water that ran on as far as the eye could reach
between two lofty ranges of porphyry and amygdaloid. The
conformation of these mountains was most curious: it
looked as if the whole district was the effect of some
prodigious crystallization, so geometrical was the outline
of each particular hill, sometimes rising cube-like, or
pentagonal, but more generally built up into a perfect
pyramid, with stairs mounting in equal gradations to the
summit.
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