s colouring of the glowing
west, and they had the appearance of tinted glass of several dyes of
red, the delicate fibres being deep of hue, the stouter ones pale; and
never did the highest moon of human invention reach to anything more
glorious and dainty, more sweetly simulative of the arts of a fairy-like
imagination than yonder cluster of icy fabrics, fashioned, as it entered
my head to conceive, as pavilions by the hands of the spirits of the
frozen world, and gilt and painted by the beams of the setting sun.

But all this wild and unreal beauty melted away to the oncoming of the
dusk; and when the sun was gone and the twilight had put a new quality
of bleakness into the air, when the sea rolled in a welter of dark
shadows, one sombre fold shouldering another--a very swarming of
restless giant phantoms--when the shining of the stars low down in the
unfathomable obscurity of the north and south quarters gave to the ocean
in those directions a frightful immensity of surface, making you feel as
though you viewed the scene from the centre of the firmament, and were
gazing down the spangled slopes of infinity--oh, _then_ it was that the
full spirit of the solitude of this pale and silent seat of ice took
possession of me. I found a meaning I had not before caught in the
complaining murmur of the night breeze blowing in small gusts along the
rocky shore, and in the deep organ-like tremulous _hum_ of the swell
thundering miles distant on the northward-pointing cliffs. This was a
note I had missed whilst the sun shone. Perhaps my senses were sharpened
by the darkness. It mingled with the booming of the bursts of water on
this side the range, and gave me to know that the northward extremity of
the island did not extend so far as I had supposed from my view of it in
the boat. Yet I could also suppose that the beat of the swell formed a
mighty cannonading capable of making itself heard afar, and the ice,
being resonant, with many smooth if not polished tracts upon it, readily
transmitted the sound, yes, though the cause of it lay as far off as the
horizon.

I will not say that my loneliness frightened me, but it subdued my
heart with a weight as if it were something sensible, and filled me with
a sort of consternation that was full of awe. The moon was up, but the
rocks hid the side of the sea she rode over, and her face was not to be
viewed from where I was until she had marched two-thirds of her path to
the meridian. The co