the tallest tree in a forest of pines? Have you been out alone on the ice-field at night, far away from your ship, amid a silence that, like Egyptian darkness, could be felt, watching the glorious tints of the-- "`Aurora Borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place?' "And, even while gazing and admiring, have you seen dark clouds roll rapidly up from the horizon and blot this aurora out, so that ere you could reach your brig you were surrounded by swirling drift and blinding snow, more dangerous far than the sand-storms that sweep over the Soudan deserts, with the thunder rattling close o'erhead, and the bewildering lightning in swift diffusive gleams intensifying the cave-like darkness that followed? "If such experiences have not been yours, you may have been tossed about on the giant waves of the broad Atlantic, you may have weathered the Cape in a gale, and the Horn in a snow-storm, you may have sweltered for weeks in a rolling calm under a tropical sun, and been the sport of a tornado in the Indian Ocean, yet there are wonders in the mighty deep seen by some who go down to the sea in ships to which you are a total stranger. From beginning to end, our voyage in that little brig, twenty years ago, was a non-propitious one. We ran before a gale all the way to Lerwick, where the Greenland fleet lay anchored. We had hardly left the rock-bound shores of Shetland--that `sea-begirdled peat moss'--ere the blackness of darkness settled down on the ocean around us; and storm and tempest became our constant companions for three long weeks, till sheltered at last under the lee of the pack, with bowsprit and topmasts gone, and the bulwarks more like the palings one sometimes sees around a cattle-field than anything else in the world. But even worse was to follow: with several other ships we took the ice, which was loose, and in three weeks' time we found ourselves all alone in the midst of a hard frozen ice-field, and fully one hundred miles from the open water, a bright blue frosty sky above us, and in silence--a silence never broken even by the cry of a bird or guttural roar of Arctic bear. "After many months of `solitary confinement,' we escaped and reached home at last. Many of the men's relations met us on the pier, dressed in deepest mourning; the `blacks,' as such dress is called, had been donned for us, for our ship had been reported as lost with all hands! "Life in that lonesome ice-pack was a weary `bide,'-- "`Day after day, day after day, And neither breath nor motion.'