BELLE ISLE AND THE COAST.—AFTER-DINNER DISCUSSION.—FIRST VIEW
OF LABRADOR.—ICEBERGS.—THE OCEAN AND THE SUNSET.
WEDNESDAY, _July 6_. After a quiet night, with a mild and favorable
breeze, the morning opens with the promise of a bright day. Our little
cloud of sail is all up in the early sunshine, and moving before the
cool south wind steadily forward down the northern sea. Brilliantly as
the summer sun looks abroad upon the mighty waters, I walk the clean,
wet deck, in the heaviest winter clothing, and have that pleasant
tingling in the veins which one feels in a brisk walk on a frosty
autumnal morning. We are abreast of South Belle Isle, high lands
fronting the ocean, with huge precipices, the fashion of most of the
eastern coast of Newfoundland. With all their sameness, their rugged
grandeur and the ceaseless battle of the waves below make them ever
interesting. Imagine the Palisades of the Hudson, and the steeper parts
of the Highlands exposed to the open Atlantic, and you will have no
imperfect picture of these shores. They have no great bank of earth and
loose rocks heaped up along their base, but step at once into the great
deep; so deep that the icebergs, several of which are in sight, float
close in, and seem to dare their very crags.
Afternoon. We have a pleasant custom of coming up, after dinner, and
eating nuts and fruits on deck. It is one of the merry seasons of the
day, when John Bull and Jonathan are apt to meet in those pleasant
encounters which bring up the past, and draw rather largely upon the
future, of their history. John is always the greatest, of course, and
ever will be, _secula seculorum_. Jonathan, “considering,” is greater
than John. To be sure he is thinner, and eats his dinner in a minute;
but then he has every thing to do, and the longest roads on earth to
travel, in the shortest time. In fact, he has many of the roads to make,
and the least help and the shortest purse of any fellow in the world
that undertakes and completes grand things. John’s first thousand years
is behind him; Jonathan’s, before him. One’s work is done; the other’s
begun. John’s fine roads were made by his forefathers; Jonathan is the
forefather himself, and is making roads for his posterity. In fact,
Jonathan is a youth only, and John an old man. When the lad gets his
growth, he will be everywhere, and the old fogy, by that time,
comparatively nowhere. Jonathan insists that he is up earlier in the
morning than John, and smarter, faster, and more ingenious. He contends
that he has seen his worst days, and John his very best. The longer the
diverging lines of the dispute continue, the further they get from any
end; and wind up finally with one general outburst of rhetoric,
distinguished for its noise, in which each springs up entirely conscious
of a perfect victory. In the complicated enjoyment of almonds, figs, and
victory, we betake ourselves to reading, the pencil and the brush.
[Illustration: PLATE N^o. 3.
AN ARCHED ICEBERG IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHT
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.]
We are coasting along the extreme northern limb of Newfoundland, bound
with its endless girdle of adamant, upon which the white lions of old
Neptune are perpetually leaping, but which they will never wrench away.
The snow lies in drifts along the heights, a novel, but rather dreary
decoration for a summer landscape. Between us and the descending sun
stands a berg, church-like in form. The blue shadows in contrast with
the pure white, have a deep, cloud-like, and grand appearance. It is
certainly a most superb thing, rising out of the blue-black waves, now
gleaming in the slant sunlight like molten silver. So vast and varied is
the scene, at this moment, that many pencils and many pens would fail to
keep pace with the rapid description of the mind.
Directly west, is the Land’s End of Newfoundland, Cape Quirpon—in the
seaman’s tongue, Carpoon, which we now shoot past. A few miles to the
north, as if it might have been split off from the Cape, lies Belle
Isle. The broad avenue of dark sea, extending westward between the cape
and the island, opens out into the Strait of Belle Isle, and carries the
eye to the shore of Labrador, our first view of that bony and starved
hermit of a country. In this skeleton sketch, as it shows on paper,
there is nothing very remarkable; but with the flesh and the apparel of
nature upon it, it is more beautiful than language can paint to the
reader’s eye. The entire east is curtained by one smooth cloud, of the
hue called the ashes-of-roses. Full against it, an iceberg rises from
the ocean, after the figure of a thunderhead, and of the color of a
newly-blown rose of Damascus—a gorgeous spectacle. The waters have that
dark violet, with a silvery surface, lucent like the face of a mirror,
and a complexion in the deeps reminding one of the soft, dusky hues of a
Claude Lorraine glass. The painter is busy with his colors, and all are
silently opening mind and heart to the universal beauty. We move on over
the lovely sea with a quiet gracefulness, in harmony with the visible
scene and with our emotions. We are looking for unusual splendors, at
the approaching sunset. I close the note-book, and give myself entirely
to the enjoyment of the lonely and still magnificence.
The book is open to record. The sun on the rugged hills of Labrador, a
golden dome; Belle Isle, a rocky, blue mass, with a wavy outline, rising
from the purple main pricked with icebergs, some a pure white, others
flaming in the resplendent sunset like red-hot metal. We are sailing
quietly as an eagle on the still air. Our English friends are heard
singing while they walk the deck, and look off upon the lonesome land
where their home is waiting for them.
All that we anticipated of the sunset, or the after-sunset, is now
present. The ocean with its waves of Tyrian dye laced with silver, the
tinted bergs, the dark-blue inland hills and brown headlands underlie a
sky of unutterable beauty. The west is all one paradise of colors.
Surely, nature, if she follows as a mourner on the footsteps of the
fall, also returns jubilant and glorious to the scenes of Eden. Here,
between the white light of day and the dark of the true evening, shade
and brightness, like Jacob and the angel, now meet and wrestle for the
mastery. Close down along the gloomy purple of the rugged earth, beam
the brightest lemon hues, soon deepening into the richest orange, with
scattered tints of new straw, freshly blown lilacs, young peas, pearl
and blue intermingled. Above are the royal draperies of the twilight
skies. Clouds in silken threads and skeins; broad velvet belts and ample
folds black as night, but pierced and steeped and edged with flaming
gold, scarlet and crimson, crimson deep as blood; crimson fleeces,
crimson deep as blood; plumes tinged with pink, and tipped with fire,
white fire. And all this glory lies sleeping on the shore, only on the
near shore of the great ethereal ocean, in the depths of which are
melted and poured out ruby, sapphire and emerald, pearl and gold, with
the living moist blue of human eyes. The painter gazes with speechless,
loving wonder, and I whisper to myself: This is the pathway home to an
immortality of bliss and beauty. Of all the days in the year, this may
be the birth-day of the King-of-day, and this effulgence an imperial
progress through the grand gate of the west. How the soul follows on in
quiet joy, dreaming of lovely ones, waiting at home, and lovely ones
departed, waiting with Christ! Here come those wondrous lines of Goethe,
marching into the memory with glowing pomp:
. . . . “The setting Sun! He bends and sinks—the day is
over-lived. Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life. Oh!
that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle
after, forever after him! I should see, in everlasting evening
beams, the stilly world at my feet,—every height on
fire,—every vale in repose,—the silver brook flowing into
golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles,
would not then break my god-like course. Already the sea, with
its heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight. Yet the god seems
at last to sink away. But the new impulse wakes. I hurry on to
drink his everlasting light,—the day before me and the night
behind,—the heavens above, and under me the waves. A glorious
dream! as it is passing, he is gone.” . . . . .
Here come the last touches of the living coloring, tinging the purple
waves around the vessel. Under the icebergs hang their pale and spectral
images, piercing the depths with their mimic spires, and giving them a
lustrous, aërial appearance. The wind is lulling, and we rise and fall
gracefully on the rolling plain. “The day is fading into the later
twilight, and the twilight into the solemn darkness.” No, not into
darkness; for in these months, the faint flame flickering all night
above the white ashes of day from the west circling around to the north
and east, the moonlight and the starlight and the northern-light, all
conspire to make the night, if not “more beloved than day,” at least
very lovely. A gloomy duskiness drapes the cape, beneath the solitary
cliffs of which lies half entombed a shattered iceberg, a ghostly wreck,
around whose dead, white ruins the mad surf springs up and flings abroad
its ghastly arms. Softly comes its sad moaning and blends with the
plaintive melodies of the ocean. Hark! a sullen roar booms across the
dusky sea—nature’s burial service and the funeral guns. A tower of the
old iceberg of the cape has tumbled into the billows. We gather
presently into the cabin for prayer, and so the first scene closes on
the coast of Labrador.