Is not all this very grand and beautiful? Have you ever seen the like before? The like of it is not to be seen upon the planet, apart from the icebergs. With cold, fixed, white death, life—warm, elastic, palpitating, glorious, powerful life—is wrestling, and will inevitably throw. Do you see “the witchery of the shadows”? Pray look aloft. Castle, temple, cliff, all built into one, are draped with shadows softer than the tint of doves, the morning’s early gray, dappled with the warm pearly blues of heaven, and edged with fire. The sun is behind the ice, and the light is pouring over. A flood of light is pouring over. All is edged with fire, streaming with lightning; all its notched and flowing edges hemmed with live, scintillating sunshine, ruby, golden, green, and blue. See you below that royal sepulchre through its crystal door? Beauty hangs her lamp in there, and the sky-blue shadow looks like the fragrant smoke of it. Now tell me, was there ever any thing more lovely? Have the poets dreamed of rarer loveliness? The surf springs up like an angel from the tomb, and, with a shout of triumph, strikes it with its silvery wings. Ha! you start. But do not be frightened. It was only the cracking of the iceberg. But was there ever such a blow?—quick—tremulous—ringing—penetrating. Why, it jarred the sea, and thrilled the heart like an electric shock. One feels as if the berg had dropped, instantly dropped an inch, and cracked to the very core. Captain Knight, shall we not fall back a little? we are surely getting too close under.
While I have been talking, the painter, who sits midship, with his thin, broad box upon his knees, making his easel of the open lid, has been dashing in the colors. The picture is finished, and so, at the word, the men pull heavily at their oars, and we come round upon the south-eastern, or the cathedral front, as I will call it, from the fact that the general appearance is architectural, and the prevailing style, the Gothic. A dome and minaret, curiously thrown in upon one wing of the berg, and some elaborately cut arches opening through the water-line into the cloister-like cavern, would suggest the Saracenic. But the pointed and the perpendicular prevail, springing up full of life and energy, vivid and flame-like in their forms.