And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold, And ice, mast high, came floating by As green as emerald.
And through the drifts, the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen, Nor shapes of men, nor beasts we ken. The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around, It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound.
Or Tennyson's lovely simile, wherein he says that we ourselves are like
Floating lonely icebergs, our crests above the ocean, With deeply submerged portions united by the sea.
Then once again the fickle sun veiled his face, and that which had appeared at first as a rocky island in mid-ocean, and afterwards as a flashing palace of crystals, now assumed a dulled whiteness as of one huge mass of purest chalk.
The heavy southern seas were dashing angrily against it, seeming jealously to resent its escape from their own frozen dominions. And the great clouds of spray which, as a consequence, were hurled into mid-air gave an added grandeur to a spectacle that seemed to need no supplementary charms. For miles around, the sea was strewn with enormous masses of floating ice, some as large as an ordinary two-story house, and all of the most fantastic shapes, which had apparently swarmed off from the main berg. One long row of these, stretching out from the monster right across the ship's course, looked for a moment not unlike a great ice-reef connected with the berg, and caused no little anxiety until the line of apparent peril had been safely negotiated. When we were clean abreast, a gun was fired from the bridge of the steamer, in order, I understand, to ascertain from the rapidity and volume of the echo the approximate distance, and, by deduction, the size of our polar acquaintance. Nor were there wanting those who were sanguine enough to expect that the atmospheric vibration set in operation by the explosion might finish the work of dislocation which any cracks or fissures had already begun, and bring down at least some tottering peaks or pinnacles. Sir John Franklin, in one of his northern voyages, saw this feat accomplished. But, if any of my companions expected to witness a similar phenomenon, they had reckoned without their host. The unaffected dignity of the sullen monster mocked our puny effort to bring about his downfall. Hercules scorned the ridiculous weapons of the pigmies! The dull booming of the gun started a thousand weird echoes on the desolate ice. They snarled out their remonstrance at our intrusion upon their wonted solitude, and then again lapsed sulkily into silence. The temperature dropped instantly, and I recalled a famous saying of Dr. Thomas Guthrie's, whose life I had just been reading. In one of his speeches, before the Synod of Angus and Mearns, he said, 'I know of churches that would be all the better of some little heat. _An iceberg of a minister_ has been floated in among them, and they have cooled down to something below zero.' '_An iceberg of a minister!_' I think of the nipping air on board when our ship was in the midst of the ice; and the memory of it makes me shiver! '_An iceberg of a minister!_' God, in His great mercy, save me from being such a minister as that!