Overwealthy in the treasure Wordsworth. LESSON LXXIV.-SPITZBERGEN. It was at one o'clock in the morning of the 6th of August, 1856, that we came to an anchor in the silent harbour of English Bay, Spitzbergen. And now, how shall I give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves? I think, perhaps, its most striking feature was the stillness, and deadness, and impassibility of this new world; ice, and rock, and water surrounded us; not a sound of any kind interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun-by this time muffled in a transparent mist—shed an awful mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality; an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose, in scarcely any other part of the world, is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England there is always perceptible an undertone of life thrilling through the atmosphere; and though no breeze should stir a single leaf, yet, in default of motion, there is always a sense of growth; but here not so much as a blade of grass was to be seen on the sides of the bald, excoriated hills. Primeval rocks and eternal ice constitute the landscape. The anchorage where we had brought up is the best to be found, with the exception, perhaps, of Magdalena Bay, along the whole west coast of Spitzbergen; indeed, it is almost the only one where you are not liable to have the ice set in upon you at a moment's notice. This bay is completely land-locked, being protected on its open side by Prince Charles's Foreland, a long island lying parallel with the mainland. Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks, about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, and as jagged as a saw; the intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, which, descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right, and sweeping like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre, rolls at last into the sea. The length of the glacial river from the spot where it originated could not have been less than thirty to thirty-five miles, or its greatest breadth less than nine or ten; but so completely did it fill up the higher end of the valley, that it was as much as you could do to distinguish the further mountains peeping up above its surface. The height of the precipice where it fell into the sea I should judge to have been about 120 feet. On the left a still more extraordinary sight presented itself. A kind of baby glacier actually hung suspended half way on the hill side, like a tear in the act of rolling down the furrowed cheek of the mountain. The glaciers are the principal characteristic of the scenery in Spitzbergen; the bottom of every valley in every part of the island is occupied, and generally completely filled by them, enabling one to realize the look of England in her glacial period, when Snowdon was still being slowly lifted towards the clouds, and every valley in Wales was brimful of ice. But the glaciers in English Bay are by no means the largest in the island. We ourselves got a view, though a distant one, of ice rivers which must have been more extensive; and Dr. Scoresby mentions several which actually measured forty or fifty miles in length, and nine or ten in breadth, while the precipice formed by their fall into the sea was sometimes upwards of 400 or 500 feet high. Nothing is more dangerous than to approach these cliffs of ice. Every now and then huge masses detach themselves from the face of the crystal steep, and topple over into the water; and woe be to the unfortunate ship which might happen to be passing below. Scoresby witnessed a mass of ice, the size of a cathedral, thunder down into the sea from a height of 400 feet. Frequently, during our stay in Spitzbergen, we ourselves observed specimens of these ice avalanches; and scarcely an hour passed without the solemn silence of the bay being disturbed by the thunderous boom, resulting from similar catastrophes occurring in adjacent valleys. A little to the northward I observed, lying on the sea shore, innumerable logs of drift-wood. This wood is floated all the way from America by the Gulf Stream; and as I walked from one huge bole to another, I could not help wondering in what primeval forest each had grown-what chance had originally cast them on the waters, and piloted them to this desert shore? Mingled with this fringe of unhewn timber that lined the beach lay waifs and strays of a more sinister kind-pieces of broken spars, an oar, a boat's flag-staff, and a few shattered fragments of some long-lost vessel's planking. Here and there, too, we would come upon skulls of walrus, ribs and shoulderblades of bears, brought possibly by the ice in winter. Suddenly a cry from Fitz, who had wandered a little to the right, brought us helter-skelter to the spot where he was standing. Half imbedded in the black moss at his feet there lay a grey deal coffin, falling almost to pieces with age; the lid was gone-probably blown off by the wind-and within were stretched the bleaching bones of a human skeleton. A rude cross at the head of the grave stood partially upright, and a half-obliterated Dutch inscription preserved a record of the dead man's name and age. It was evidently some poor whaler of the last century, to whom his companions had given the only burial possible in this frost-hardened earth, which even the summer sun has no force to penetrate beyond a couple of inches, and which will not afford to man the shallowest grave. During the whole of our stay in Spitzbergen we enjoyed unbounded sunshine. The nights were even brighter than the days, and afforded Fitz an opportunity of taking some photographic views by the light of a midnight sun. The cold was never very intense, though the thermometer remained below freezing; but about four o'clock every evening the salt-water bay in which the schooner lay was veneered over with a pellicle of ice, one-eighth of an inch in thickness, and so elastic that, even when the sea beneath was considerably agitated, its surface remained unbroken, the smooth round waves taking the appearance of billows of oil. If such is the effect produced by the slightest modification of the sun's power in the month of August, you can imagine what must be the result of his total disappearance beneath the horizon. No description can give an idea of the intense rigour of the six months' winter. Stones crack with the noise of thunder; in a crowded hut the breath of its occupants will fall in flakes of snow; wine and spirits turn to ice; the snow burns like caustic-if it touches the flesh it brings the skin away with it; the soles of your stockings may be burned off your feet before you feel the slightest warmth from the fire; linen taken out of boiling water instantly stiffens to the consistency of a wooden board; and heated stones will not prevent the sheets of the bed from freezing. If these are the effects of the climate within an air-tight, fire-warmed, crowded hut, what must they be among the dark, storm-lashed mountain peaks outside?-Lord Dufferin's "Letters from High Latitudes." LESSON LXXV.-SELFISHNESS. If I were asked what kind of young people were the most unhappy, what do you think my answer would be? The poor, or the sick, or the ugly, or the stupid? Oh no! these may all be happy and useful. It is only the selfish, those that "seek their own," that are never satisfied. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, they cry, "Give, give," but never say, "It is enough;" for it would seem that the more people seek their own happiness the less they get of it. It has been said, “The self, the I, the me, and the like, all belong to the evil spirit, and we know that he is not a happy spirit. No human being can be really happy who is not giving or trying to give happiness to others. The sixpence added to the hoard of the little selfish miser, or spent by the glutton in the cake-shop, may give a moment's pleasure, but will leave no pleasant thoughts behind; while the sixpence, part of which is dropped into the missionary box, part given to feed a poor starving child, part given to purchase a biscuit or an orange to please the little sister, will send the happy spender of it on her way bright-faced and light-hearted." Here is a "Recipe for making every day happy." If each of us were to follow it, there would soon be an 1 |