Spitzbergen and its islands, with some other countries within the Arctic Circle, exhibit a kind of scenery which is altogether novel. The principal objects which strike the eye are innumerable mountainous peaks, ridges, precipices, or needles, rising immediately out of the sea, to an elevation of three thousand or four thousand feet, the colour of which, at a moderate distance, appears to be blackish shades of brown, green, grey, and purple; snow or ice, in striæ, or patches, occupying the various clefts and hollows in the sides of the hills, capping some of the mountain summits, and filling with extended beds the most considerable valleys; and ice of the glacier-form occurring at intervals all along the coast in particular situations, as already described, in prodigious accumulations. The glistening, or vitreous appearance of the iceberg precipices, the purity, whiteness, and beauty of the sloping expanse, formed by the adjoining or intermixed mountains and rocks, perpetually “covered with a mourning veil of black lichens,” with the sudden transitions into a robe of purest white, where patches or beds of snow occur, present a variety and extent of contrast altogether peculiar, which, when enlightened by the occasional ethereal brilliancy of the Polar sky, and harmonized in its serenity with the calmness of the ocean, constitute a picture both novel and magnificent. There is, indeed, a kind of majesty, not to be conveyed in words, in these extraordinary accumulations of snow and ice in the valleys, and in the rocks above rocks, and peaks above peaks, in the mountain groups, seen rising above the ordinary elevation of the clouds, and terminating occasionally in crests of everlasting snow, especially when you approach the shore under shelter of the impenetrable density of a summer fog, in which case the fog sometimes disperses like the drawing of a curtain, when the strong contrast of light and shade, brightened by a cloudless atmosphere and powerful sun, bursts on the senses in a brilliant exhibition. Here are to be beheld the glories of that one God, who is the Maker of all things in heaven and on earth, and who, unlike the false deities of heathen nations, is not confined in his presence and government to any particular zone of the earth’s surface, but illustrates the skill and excellence of his creation, both in the beauties of icy and torrid climes.