it with my hands locked behind me, my head
sunk, lost in thought. The wind was steadily freshening; it split with a
howling noise upon the ice-crags and unequal surfaces, and spun with a
hollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the other
side of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting and
whitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon that
made a blue dulness of the junction of the elements there; but though a
few clouds out of the collection of vapour in the north-east had floated
to the zenith and were sailing down the south-west heaven, the azure
remained pure and the sun very frostily white and sparkling.

I am writing a strange story with the utmost candour, and trust that the
reader will not judge me severely for my confession of weakness, or
consider me as wanting in the stuff out of which the hardy seaman is
made for owning to having shed tears and been stunned by the loss of my
little boat and slender stock of food. You will say, "It is not in the
power of the dead to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than a
poor unburied corpse?" I answer, "True," and declare that of the two
bodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitude
was about them, and they took a frightful character from it; they
communicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-clad
island; their presence made a principality of it for the souls of dead
sailors, and into their lifelike stillness it put its own supernatural
spirit of loneliness; so that to my imagination, disordered by suffering
and exposure, this melancholy region appeared a scene without parallel
on the face of the globe, a place of doom and madness, as dreadful and
wild as the highest mood of the poet could reach up to.

By this time the boat was out of sight. I looked and looked, but she was
gone. Then came my good angel to my help and put some courage into me.
"After all," thought I, "what do I dread? Death! it can but come to
that. It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, "_A man can die
but once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with a
stout heart._" He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Were
he a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep more
soundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as now
afflicts me who cling to life, as if this--this," I cried, looking
around me, "were a paradise of warmth and bea