_Feb. 3, '77_--From 4 to 6 P. M. crossing the Delaware, (back again at
my Camden home,) unable to make our landing, through the ice; our boat
stanch and strong and skilfully piloted, but old and sulky, and poorly
minding her helm. (_Power_, so important in poetry and war, is also
first point of all in a winter steamboat, with long stretches of
ice-packs to tackle.) For over two hours we bump'd and beat about,
the invisible ebb, sluggish but irresistible, often carrying us long
distances against our will. In the first tinge of dusk, as I look'd
around, I thought there could not be presented a more chilling, arctic,
grim-extended, depressing scene. Everything was yet plainly visible; for
miles north and south, ice, ice, ice, mostly broken, but some big
cakes, and no clear water in sight. The shores, piers, surfaces,
roofs, shipping, mantled with snow. A faint winter vapor hung a fitting
accompaniment around and over the endless whitish spread, and gave it
just a tinge of steel and brown.
_Feb. 6_.--As I cross home in the 6 P. M. boat again, the transparent
shadows are filled everywhere with leisurely falling, slightly slanting,
curiously sparse but very large, flakes of snow. On the shores, near and
far, the glow of just-lit gas-clusters at intervals. The ice, sometimes
in hummocks, sometimes floating fields, through which our boat goes
crunching. The light permeated by that peculiar evening haze, right
after sunset, which sometimes renders quite distant objects so
distinctly.