rs on the subject of Polar
Regions--especially compilers--to dwell disproportionately on the gloomy
side of the picture; insomuch that readers are led, not to over-estimate
the grand and the terrible aspects of the polar oceans, but to
under-estimate the sweet and the beautiful influences that at certain
periods reign there.

We quarrel not with authors for dwelling on the tremendous and the
awful. Too much cannot be said on these points; but while they do not
by any means paint the dark side of their picture too black, they fail
to touch in the lights with sufficient brilliancy. We have had some
personal experience of the arctic regions, and have found it extremely
difficult to get many persons--even educated men and women--to
understand that there _is_ a summer there, though a short one; that in
many places it is an uncommonly hot and excessively brilliant summer;
and that the sun, as if to make amends for its prolonged absence in
winter, shines all night as well as all day, blazing on the crystal
icebergs and pure snow (which _never_ disappear from those seas) with a
degree of splendour that renders the far north transcendently beautiful
and pre-eminently attractive.

We admit freely that the prevailing character of arctic seas, during the
greater part of the year, is dark, gloomy, forbidding. But this is the
very reason why their brief but cheering smiles should be brought
prominently into the foreground, and, if they cannot in justice be dwelt
on long, at least be touched upon with emphasis.

Why, in some of our cyclopaedia accounts of the realms of "thick-ribbed
ice," so much prominence is given to "the horrors and wide desolation of
the scene," and so much graphic power is expended in working up the
reader's imagination to a conception of the dreadful dangers and the
appalling terrors that await the madman who should dare to venture
within the arctic circle, that persons who have not been there might
well be tempted to shrink in affright from the very contemplation of a
region in which there does not appear to be one redeeming quality.

We repeat, that we do not think the one side of the picture has been too
darkly painted,--but the other side has been painted too slightly.

At the same time, we would caution our readers against jumping to the
opposite extreme. The dark side of the picture is in reality out of all
proportion to the light. And we do not hesitate to state our confirmed
opinion, that the a