"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge

Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of

Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with

"the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of

dreary space,--that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields

of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine

heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the

multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these death-white realms I

formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended

notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely

impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected

themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to

the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the

broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly

moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,

with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low

horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent,

attesting the hour of eventide.

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine

phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over

quickly: it was an object of terror.

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a

distant crowd surrounding a gallows.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped

understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly

interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated

on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when,

having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed

us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills,

and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with

passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other

ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of

Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.

I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The

breakfast-room door opened.

"Boh! Madam Mope!" cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused:

he found the room apparently empty.

"Where the dickens is she!" he continued. "Lizzy! Georgy! (calling

to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the

rain--bad animal!"




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