SKETCHING THE PASSING BERGS.—THE STORY OF AN ICEBERG.
THE painter is a model of industry, sketching and painting the bergs as
we pass them. They are now clustered on the northern horizon, with a few
exceptions. We have been for some time near one, out of which might be
cut an entire block of Broadway buildings, evidently presenting the same
upper surface that it had when it slid as a glacier from the polar
shore. If such is the fact, we infer that in its long glacial experience
it could not have remained long near any mass of earth higher than
itself, for there is not a stone or particle of dust or earthy stain
upon it. It is as spotless as a cloud “after the tempest.” How beautiful
is the sentiment of it! It carries the imagination away to those
heavenly walls depicted in Revelation, and sends it back upon the track
of its own story.
The story of an iceberg! yes, indeed; and a most wonderful tale would it
be, could it be truthfully written. It would run up into, and become
lost in the story of the great glaciers of Greenland; the half of which
science itself has not learned, profoundly as it has penetrated the
mysteries of the Alpine glaciers.
There are valleys reaching from the interior to the coast, filled with
glaciers of great depth and breadth, which move forward with an
imperceptible but regular motion. The continent, as one might call
Greenland, does not shed the bulk of its central waters in fluid rivers,
but discharges them to the ocean in solid, crystalline, slowly
progressing streams. They flow, or rather march, with irresistible,
mighty force, and far-resounding footsteps, crossing the shore line, a
perpetual procession of block-like masses, flat or diversified with hill
and hollow on the top, advancing upon the sea until too deeply immersed
longer to resist the buoyant power and pressure of the surrounding
waters, when they break upwards, and float suspended in the vast oceanic
abyss. The van of the glacial host, previously marked off by fissures
into ranks, rushes from the too close embrace of its new element, and
wheels away, an iceberg—the glistening planet of the sea, whose mazy,
tortuous orbit none can calculate but Him who maps the unseen currents
of the main.
When and where, on the lengthy Greenland coast, did this huge block make
the grand exchange of elements? Which, if any of these great buildings
“not made with hands,” now whitening the blue fields of Neptune,
followed or preceded it? What have been its solemn rounds? Through what
winters has it slept, and caught the snows upon the folds of its
sculptured draperies? How many summers has it bared its spotless bosom
to the sun and rains? What nights of auroral splendors have glassed
their celestial countenance in its shining mirrors? What baths and vases
of blue water have opened their pure depths to moon and stars? What
torrents and cascades have murmured in its glassy chasms, crystal
grottoes, Alpine dells? And who shall count its battles with the waves
and tempests, when with the surf about its shoulders and among its
locks, and the clouds around its brow, it stood far up from the
unsounded valleys of ocean “tiptoe on the mountain top”?
In the defiles and gorges of the Arctic coast are prodigious
accumulations of ice—the congelation of small streams flowing from the
adjacent mountains—the glaciers of the coast range, in short. These
gradually encroach upon, and overhang the sea; and are continually
breaking off, from the undermining of the waves which beat at their
base. Such is the depth of water, that the hugest avalanche of ice can
fall with safety to itself, and float away.
When, and in what bay or inlet, may this Great Northern have been
launched? Out of what gloomy fiord may have rolled the billows, after
its icy fastenings were loosed, and it slid, with the thunder of an
earthquake, down its slippery ways, and plunged into the black deep?
Until science have her beaten pathway over polar waves and hills, and
measure the rain-falls and the snow-falls, and the freezings of the one
and the compactings of the other, the story of the glacier and the
iceberg, in their native land and seas, will be left, in part, to the
imagination—a faculty, after all, that will ever deal with those
wonderful ices about as satisfactorily as the faculty that judges
according to the sense, as Bishop Leighton calls the mere scientific
faculty. The truth of this is illustrated by the very icebergs about us.
Emphatically as they speak to the naturalist with his various
instrumentalities, they speak, at the same moment, with marvellous
eloquence to the poet and the painter. There are forces, motions, and
forms, voices, beauties, and a sentiment, which escape the touch of
science, and are scarcely caught by the subtle, poetic mind. Icebergs,
to the imaginative soul, have a kind of individuality and life. They
startle, frighten, awe; they astonish, excite, amuse, delight and
fascinate; clouds, mountains and structures, angels, demons, animals and
men spring to the view of the beholder. They are a favorite playground
of the lines, surfaces and shapes of the whole world, the heavens above,
the earth and the waters under: of their sounds, motions and colors
also. These are the poet’s and the painter’s fields, more than they are
the fields of the mere naturalist, much as they are his. Do not these
fifty bergs, in sight from any crag frowning in its iron strength above
the surf, speak more a living language to the creative, than to the
mensural faculty? Let us see.
They have a daily experience, and a current history more remarkable now
than ever. Whatever may have been the wonders of their conception, birth
and growth; however lengthy and devious their voyage, they are present
in these strange seas, in these tepid waters and soft airs, to undergo
their last, fatal changes, and dissolve forever into their final tomb.
There are fifty icebergs, more or less. Apparently similar in
appearance, yet each differs widely from all others. Exhibiting similar
phenomena, yet each has complexions, movements, sounds and wonders of
its own. If we choose, though, to add to the performances of to-day,
those of yesterday and to-morrow, we shall find that the experience of
any one berg closely resembles that of all. The entire circle of its
looks and doings corresponds with the circle of nearly every other berg,
and so of all together, differing merely in the matter of time—as to
_when_ the changes take place. The description upon which I will
venture, and which might be gleaned from the foregoing pages, is,
therefore, strictly true, except that the phases and accidents are
supposed to occur in rapid succession. In a word, what you would behold
in all of these fifty, within twenty-four hours, you are to fancy of
one, in the course of an afternoon.
I have before me, in my mind’s eye, the Windsor Castle berg, fresh from
the north, and the Great Castle berg, of Belle Isle water, which it
entered early last May, and as large, at the time of its arrival, as
both of them at present combined. And so I am looking at a veritable
berg of Cape St. Louis, small, though, in comparison with the berg of
Cape St. Francis, “a vast cathedral of dazzling white ice, with a front
of 250 feet perpendicular from the sea,” visited by the Bishop of
Newfoundland in the summer of 1853.
I will describe, first, the figure of the berg. It is a combination of
Alp, castle, mosque, Parthenon and cathedral. It has peaks and slopes;
cliffs, crags, chasms and caverns; lakes, streams and waterfalls. It has
towers, battlements and portals. It has minarets, domes and steeples;
roofs and gables; balustrades and balconies; fronts, sides and
interiors; doors, windows and porches; steps and entrances; columns,
pilasters, capitals and entablatures; frieze, architrave and cornice;
arches, cloisters, niches, statuary and countless decorations; flutings,
corrugations, carvings, panels of glassy polish and in the rough; Greek,
Roman, Gothic, Saracenic, Pagan, Savage. It is crested with blades and
needles; heaped here and there with ruins, blocks and bowlders,
splintered and crumbled masses. This precipice has a fresh, sharp
fracture; yonder front, with its expanse of surface beautifully
diversified with sculptured imagery and other ornament, has the polish
of ivory—the glassy polish of mirrors—the enamel of sea-shells—the
fierce brightness of burnished steel—the face of rubbed marble—of
smoothest alabaster—of pearl—porcelain—lily-white flesh—lily-white
wax—the flesh-finish of beauty done in the spotless stone of Italy.
This, though, is but the iceberg of the air; the head and crown only of
the iceberg of the deep sea.
From the figure of the berg, I will come to describe an important
feature of its life and history: its motion; not its movement from place
to place, but upon its centre—its rotation and vibration. Where the
berg is not grounded—in which case it only beats and sways to and fro,
vibrating through the arc of a circle like an inverted pendulum—when it
is not grounded, it must be supposed to hang suspended at the
surface—all but the topmost part—just _under_ the surface of the
ocean, very much as a cloud, a great white thunder-head, hangs suspended
in the upper air. Balanced around its heart, far down in the deep, and
in its cold solidity “dry as summer dust”—poised upon its centre with
perfect exactness, it is evident that the loss of a single ton of ice
shifts that centre, shifts it an ounce-notch on the bar of the mighty
scale, destroys the equilibrium, and subjects the whole to the necessity
of some small movement in order to regain its rest. When, instead of one
ton, thousands fall off, it sets a rolling the whole clifted and
pinnacled circumference.
And here begins that exhibition of novel forms and shapes, and of awful
force, and the sublimity of stupendous masses in motion, that so
impresses, awes, startles, and fascinates the beholder. A berg in
repose, wondrous as it is to him that dares to linger in its presence,
differs from itself in action, as a hero in his sleep differs from
himself upon the field of battle.
With regard to the motions of the berg, it must be borne in mind, that,
from the fact of its centre being not on a level with the surface of the
sea, but at depths below, they are quite different from what might at
first be imagined. A rough globe, revolving upon its axis, with but a
small portion of its bulk, say a twelfth, above the water; or, better
still, the hub and spokes merely of a common wagon wheel, slowly rolling
back and forth, will serve for illustration. The uppermost spoke, in its
vibrations to the right and left, describes a line of some extent along
the surface, not unlike an upright stick moving to and fro, and
gradually rising and sinking as it moves. In this movement back and
forth, the two adjacent spokes will be observed to emerge and disappear
correspondingly. In this way, a berg of large diameter, instead of
falling over upon the sea like a wall or precipice, appears to advance
bodily, slowly sinking as it comes, with a slightly increasing
inclination toward you. In its backward roll, this is reversed. It seems
to be retreating, slowly rising as it floats away, with a slightly
increasing inclination from you. In these grand vibrations, projecting
points and masses of opposite sides correspondingly emerge and
disappear, rising apparently straight up out of the sea on this side,
going down as straight on the other.
From the figure and motion of the berg, I come to describe the motive
power, rather the explosive power, through which the delicate balance is
destroyed, and motion made a necessity in order to gain again
equilibrium and rest. Whatever may be the latent heat of ice, is a
question for the professed naturalist. Two things are evident to the
unlearned observer: an iceberg is as solid as ivory, or marble from the
lowest depths of a quarry, and cold apparently as any substance on the
earth can be made. This compact and perfectly frozen body, immersed in
the warm seas of summer, and warmer atmosphere, finds its entire
outside, and especially that portion of it which is exposed to the July
sun, expanding under the influence of the penetrating heat. The scrutiny
of science would, no doubt, find it certain that this heat, in some
measure, darts in from all sides in converging rays to the very heart.
The expanding power of heat becomes at length an explosive force, and
throws off, with all the violence and suddenness of gunpowder, in
successive flakes, portions of the surface. The berg, then, bursts from
expansion, as when porcelain cracks with sharp report, suddenly and
unequally heated on the winter stove. Judge of the report when the
porcelain of a great cliff cracks and falls, or when the entire berg is
blasted asunder by the subtle, internal fire of the summer sun! If you
would hear thunders, or whole broadsides and batteries of the heaviest
ordnance, come to the iceberg then.
Speaking incidentally of noises, reminds me of the hues and tints of the
iceberg. Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like the flowers of
the field. Would you behold this berg apparelled with a glory that
eclipses all floral beauty, and makes you think, not only of the clouds
of heaven at sunrise and sunset, but of heaven itself, you must come to
it at sunrise and at sunset. Then, too, you would hear its voices and
its melodies, the deep and mournful murmuring of the surf in its
caverns. Hark! In fancy I hear them now, half thunder, and half the
music of some mighty organ.
And this reminds me of the sea, which shares with the iceberg something
of the glory and the power. In the first place, from the white
brightness of the ice, the eye is tuned to such a high key, or so
stimulated and bedazzled, that the ocean is not only dark by contrast,
but dark in reality. It is purple, so deep as to amount almost to
blackness—an evening violet I would call it, a complexion magnificent
and rich exceedingly in the blaze of noon, and at late and early hours
when the skies are full of brilliant colors. What heightens the effect
of this dye of the ocean, is the pale emerald water around the berg, and
in which it floats as in a vast bath, the loveliness, clarity and divine
beauty of which no language can paint in a way to kindle the proper
feeling and emotion. From ten to fifty feet in breadth, it encircles the
berg, a zone or girdle of sky-green, that most delicate tint of the
sunset heavens, and lies, or plays with a kind of serpent play, between
the greenish white ice and the violet water, as the bright deeps of air
lie beyond the edge of a blue-black cloud. There is no perceptible
blending, but a sharp line which follows, between the bright and the
dark, the windings of the berg, across which you may, if you have the
temerity, row the bow of your whale-boat, and gaze down, down the
fearfully transparent abyss, until the dim ice-cliffs and the black
deeps are lost in each other’s awful embrace.
I have spoken of the figure, motion, and the breaking of the iceberg,
incidentally mentioning its sounds, its colors, and the surrounding
waters. You are now ready to go with us, and spend the afternoon about
it. Early in the morning, and for the last hour, all but its heights and
peaks has been wrapped in cloud-like fog. That, you discover, is
thinning off, and will presently all pass away. The breeze is fresh from
the north, and we will sail down upon the north-eastern side, until we
have it between us and the 3 o’clock sun. We are upon soundings, and, as
we glide from the broad sunny tract into the shadow of the berg, the
ocean should be green, a deep green. But we have been sailing with the
white ice in our eyes, and you see the ocean a dark purple. The captain
drops sail, and sets the men at their oars. As the current sets back
from the berg—the reverse of the current below—you notice that they
are pulling slowly, but steadily forward without any perceptible
advance. We are distant a good hundred yards, as near again as we ought
to be for safety. But this is the position for the painter, and it will
be the care of the captain to keep it, the required time, as nearly as
possible.
As the broad roller lifts us lightly and gracefully, and leaves us
sinking on its after-slope, how majestic is the silent march of it, the
noiseless flight of it! But look!—look!—as it flees in all its
imposing breadth of darkness, see the great, green star upon its
breast—a spangle green as grass, as the young spring grass in the
sunshine, gleaming like some skylight of the deep, some emerald window
in the dome of the sea-palace, letting up the splendor. What do you
suppose that is? It is ice, a point of the berg pricking up into the
illuminated surface and reflecting the light. You will understand that
better, perhaps, by and by. But wait an instant. Now!—now!—Beauty
strikes the billow with her magic rod, and, presto—change!—all is
glittering green. A thousand feet of purple, cloud-like wave passes, in
the twinkling of an eye, into the brightness of an emerald gem, and thus
rolls up and smites the iceberg. And thus, like night perpetually
bursting into the splendid noon, roll up the billows, and strike the
minutes of the hour. How beautiful is the transfiguration! See them
split upon this angle of the castle; and as they run along the walls,
with the whispery, hissing sound of smoothly sliding waters, mark how
high they wash, and sweep them with their snowy banners, here and there
bending over, and curling into long scrolls of molten glass, which burst
in dazzling foam, and plunge in many an avalanche of sparkling jewelry.
Into the great porch of yonder Parthenon they rush in crowds, and
thunder their applause upon the steps.
Is not all this very grand and beautiful? Have you ever seen the like
before? The like of it is not to be seen upon the planet, apart from the
icebergs. With cold, fixed, white death, life—warm, elastic,
palpitating, glorious, powerful life—is wrestling, and will inevitably
throw. Do you see “the witchery of the shadows”? Pray look aloft.
Castle, temple, cliff, all built into one, are draped with shadows
softer than the tint of doves, the morning’s early gray, dappled with
the warm pearly blues of heaven, and edged with fire. The sun is behind
the ice, and the light is pouring over. A flood of light is pouring
over. All is edged with fire, streaming with lightning; all its notched
and flowing edges hemmed with live, scintillating sunshine, ruby,
golden, green, and blue. See you below that royal sepulchre through its
crystal door? Beauty hangs her lamp in there, and the sky-blue shadow
looks like the fragrant smoke of it. Now tell me, was there ever any
thing more lovely? Have the poets dreamed of rarer loveliness? The surf
springs up like an angel from the tomb, and, with a shout of triumph,
strikes it with its silvery wings. Ha! you start. But do not be
frightened. It was only the cracking of the iceberg. But was there ever
such a blow?—quick—tremulous—ringing—penetrating. Why, it jarred the
sea, and thrilled the heart like an electric shock. One feels as if the
berg had dropped, instantly dropped an inch, and cracked to the very
core. Captain Knight, shall we not fall back a little? we are surely
getting too close under.
While I have been talking, the painter, who sits midship, with his thin,
broad box upon his knees, making his easel of the open lid, has been
dashing in the colors. The picture is finished, and so, at the word, the
men pull heavily at their oars, and we come round upon the
south-eastern, or the cathedral front, as I will call it, from the fact
that the general appearance is architectural, and the prevailing style,
the Gothic. A dome and minaret, curiously thrown in upon one wing of the
berg, and some elaborately cut arches opening through the water-line
into the cloister-like cavern, would suggest the Saracenic. But the
pointed and the perpendicular prevail, springing up full of life and
energy, vivid and flame-like in their forms.
As the berg faces, we are getting the last glances of the 4 o’clock sun,
and have broad sheets of both light and shadow. You see how spirited the
whole thing is. It is full of brilliant, strong effects. While the
hollows and depressions harbor the soft, slaty shadows, points and
prominences fairly blaze and sparkle with sunshine. The current now, you
discover, sweeps us past the ice, and compels us to turn about and row
up the stream. Here is the point where all is strong and picturesque,
and here they hold on for the painter. Let us sit upon the little
bow-deck, and look, and listen to the noises of the waves at play in the
long, concealed, under-sea piazza. How they slap the hollow arches!
Hisses, long-drawn sighs, booming thunder-sounds, mingle with low
muttering, plunging, rattling, and popping—a bedlam of all the lunatic
voices of the ocean. We appear to be at the edge of a shower, such a
sprinkling and spattering of drops. All abroad, and all aloft, from
every edge and gutter the iceberg spouts, and rains, and drips. Over the
entire face of the ice is flowing swiftly down one noiseless river thin
as glass, looking, for all the world, like the perpetual falling of a
transparent veil over the richest satin. Here and there, the delicate
stream cuts into the silvery enamel, and engraves, in high relief,
brilliant shields of jewelry, diamonds, rubies, amethysts, emeralds and
sapphires. But yonder is a rare touch of the enchanter. Pray, look at it
carefully. It is a glistening blue line of ice, threading the whiteness
from top to bottom, a good two hundred feet. It looks as if the berg
were struck, not with lightning, but with sapphire. It is simply
transparent ice, and may be compared to a fissure filled with pellucid
spring-water, with depths of darkness beyond the visible, illuminated
edge. Darkness below the pure light flowing in, and reflecting from the
inner sides of the white ice, gives us the blue. You understand the
process by which so beautiful a result is effected? Well, the glacier of
which this berg is a kind of spark, is mainly compacted snows,
compressed to metallic hardness in the omnipotent grasp of nature. As it
slides on the long, inland valley slope, it bends and cracks. The
surface-water fills the crevice, and is frozen. Thus the glacier is
mended, but marked forever with the splendid scar which you see before
you. You fancy it has the hardness of a gem; it is softer than the
flinty masses between which it seems to have been run like a casting. On
the opposite slope of the berg, you will find it the channel of a
torrent, melting and wearing faster than the primitive ice.
How terribly startling is this explosion! It resounded like a
field-piece. And yet you perceive only a small bank of ice floating out
from below where it burst off. Small as it is, the whole berg has felt
it, and is slightly rolling on its deep down centre. You perceive that
it is a perfectly adjusted pair of scales, and weighs itself anew at the
loss of every pound. At the loss of every _ounce_, the central point,
around which millions of tons are balanced, darts aside a very little,
and calls upon the entire bulk to make ready and balance all afresh. You
see the process going on. There, the water-line is slowly rising; and
you peep into the long, greenish-white hollow, polished and winding as
the interior of a sea-shell. Now it pauses, and returns. So will it rise
and sink alternately until it stands like a headland of everlasting
marble.
Again the painter wipes his brushes, puts away his second picture, and
tacks a fresh pasteboard within the cover of his box, and gives the word
to pull for the south-western side. How finely nature sculptures her
decorations! Would not Palmer, Powers, and others of that company, whose
poetic language is in spotless stone, love to be with us? Mark the high
reliefs, and the deep, fine fluting of this angle, as we pass from the
Temple front to the clifted. Here you see less to please, and more to
terrify. A word or so describes it: It is a precipice of sparkling,
white ice, freshly broken. The edge of newly broken china is nearest
like it, with the suspicion of green for forty feet or more up, the
reflection of that lovely pale green water. How the currents recoil and
roll in upon the huge wall in whirling eddies, requiring steady toil at
the oars, to keep off a plump two hundred yards, the proper distance for
sketching so large a perpendicular mass.
If we except the quality and texture of the fracture, there is little to
paint in all this blaze of sunlight. The outline of the berg, though, is
worth remembering. It cuts the blue vault like the edge of a bright
sword, and pricks it with flashing spears. The eye darts from point to
point along its lengthy, zig-zag and flowing thread, and sweeps from the
sea upward and over to the sea again. How persistently the treacherous
current labors to bear us in upon the cliff! Let alone the oars five
minutes, and we should be among the great rain-drops slipping from the
overhanging crags.
Horrible! The berg is burst. The whole upper front is coming. There it
is—gone in the sea. Keep still!—Keep still!—Don’t be frightened! The
captain will manage it. Here come the big swells. Hurra! Look out for
the next! Here we go—splendid! Now for the third and last. How she
combs as she comes. Hurra!—Hurra! Here we are—all safe—inside of
them. See them go!—racing over the ocean, circles of plumed cavalry.
Now for the berg. He’ll make a magnificent roll of it, if he don’t go to
pieces. Should he, then put us half a mile away. See it rise!—The
water-line—rising—rising—up—up. It looks like a carriage-way.
Hark!—Crack—crack—crack. Quick!—quick! Look at the black water
here!—all spots and spangles of green. Something is coming! There it
comes! The very witchcraft of the deep—Neptune’s half-acre, bowers,
thrones, giants, eagles, elephants, vases spilling, fountains pouring,
torrents tumbling, glassy banks. Look at the peaks slanting off into the
blue air, and the great slant precipice. Hah! Don’t you see? It is
coming again—slowly coming! Crack—crack—crack. Down sinks the
garden—on roll the swells—down go bowers, thrones, statuary—lost amid
the tumult and thunder of the surf. Over bends the precipice—this way
over—frightfully over—in roll the waves—roaring, thundering
in—dashing, lashing crag and chasm. Wonderful to see! Waterfalls
bursting into light above—plunging in snowy columns to the sea.
How terrible—terrible all this is! But O, how beautiful! Who, that does
not witness it, knows any thing of the bursting of an iceberg? It comes
with the crash of a thunderbolt. But how can one tell the horrible,
shocking noise? A pine split by lightning has the point, but not the
awful breadth and fulness of the sound. Air, ocean, and the berg, all
fairly spring at the power of it. And then the ice-fall, with its
ringing, rumbling, crashing roar, and the heavy, explosion-like voice of
the final plunge, followed by the wild, frantic dashing of the waters.
You see the whole upper face of the ice, yards deep, and scores of them
in width, all gone. All was blasted off instantly, and dropped at once,
a stupendous cataract of brilliant ruins.
Here we are, at last, where the painter will revel—between the glories
of sunset and the iceberg. What shall we call all this magnificence,
clustered in a square quarter of a mile? The Bernese Alps in miniature.
A dark violet sea, and Alps in burnished silver, with the colors of the
rainbow dissolving among them. Lofty ridges, of the shape of flames,
have the tint of flame; out of the purity of lilies bloom the pink and
rose; sky-blue shadows sleep in the defiles; I will not say cloth of
gold drapes, but water of gold washes—water of green, of orange,
scarlet, crimson, purple, wash the crags and steeps; strange metallic
tints gleam in the shaggy caverns—copper, bronze, and gold. Endless
grace of form and outline!—endless, endless beauty! Its shining image
is in the deep, hanging there as in a molten looking-glass. Look down
and see it. Now the last rays of day strike the berg. How the hues and
tints change and flit, flush and fade! A very mirror for the fleeting
glories of the sunset, or the fitful complexions of the northern light.
Prodigal Nature! Is she ever wasting splendors at this rate? Watch them
on this broad, slanting park of lily-white satin. White!—It has just a
breath of pink. Pink?—It is the richest rose—rose deepening into
purple—purple trembling into blue, pearly blue, skirted with
salmon-tints and lilac. Where are the train-bearers of this imperial
robe? There they are, the smooth, black swells, one, two, three, rolling
up, and changing into green as they roll up—far up, and break in
sparkling diamonds on the bosom of the lustrous alabaster.
Do you hear the music? O what power in sound! Clothed in green and
silver, the royal bands of the great deep are playing at every portal of
the iceberg. Hark! Half thunder, and half the harmony of grand organs.
“Waters, in the still magnificence,
Their solemn cymbals beat.”
The painter’s work is over. And now for harbor—all sails spread—a
downy pressure on them, and the twilight ocean. Indomitable pencil! If
the man is not at it again!—A last, flying sketch in lead. Let us take
one more look at the berg—a farewell look. It is a beautiful
creation—superlatively beautiful. It is more—sublime and
beautiful—fold upon fold—spotless ermine—caught up from the billows,
and suspended by the fingers of Omnipotence.
The Merciful One! It is falling!—Cliffs and pinnacles
bursting—crashing—tumbling with redoubling thunders.—Pillars and
sheaves of foam leap aloft.—Wave chases wave, careering wild and
high.—Columns and splintered fragments spring from the deep
convulsively, toppling and plunging.—A multitude of small icebergs spot
the dusky waters. One slender obelisk, slowly rocking to and fro, stands
a monument among the scattered ruins.