The air was warm, he says, almost as a summer’s night at home, and yet there were the icebergs and the bleak mountains, with which the fancy, in our own land of green hills and waving woods, can associate nothing but what is cold and repellent. Bright was the sky, and soft and strangely inspiring as the skies of Italy. The bergs had wholly lost their chilly aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of burnished metal or solid flame. Nearer at hand they were huge blocks of Parian marble, encrusted with colossal gems of pearl and opal. One in particular exhibited the perfection of grandeur. Its form was not unlike that of the Coliseum, and it lay so far away that half its height was buried beneath the line of blood-red waters. The sun, slow moving along its path of glory, passed behind it, and the old Roman ruin seemed suddenly to break into flame. [Illustration: OFF THE COAST OF GREENLAND.] Nothing, indeed, but the pencil of the artist could depict the wonderful richness of this combined landscape and seascape. Church, in his great picture of “The Icebergs,” has grandly exhibited a scene not unlike that we have attempted to describe. In the shadows of the bergs the water was a rich green, and nothing could be more soft and tender than the gradations of colour made by the sea shoaling on the sloping tongues of some of these floating masses. The tint increased in intensity where the ice overhung the waters, and a deep cavern in one of them exhibited the solid colour of the malachite mingled with the transparency of the emerald, while, in strange contrast, a broad belt of cobalt blue shot diagonally through its body. The enchantment of the scene was heightened by a thousand little cascades which flashed into the sea from the icebergs, the water being discharged from basins of melted snow and ice which tranquilly reposed far up in the hollows of their topmost surface. From other bergs large boulders were occasionally detached, and these plunged into the water with a deafening din, while the roll and rush of the ocean resounded like the music of a solemn dirge through their broken archways. * * * * * The contrasts and combinations of colour in the Polar world are, indeed, among its particular attractions, and of their kind they cannot be surpassed or imitated even in the gorgeous realms of the Tropics. The pale azure gleam of the ice, the dazzling whiteness of the snow, the vivid verdure of the sunlit plains, the deep emerald tints, crossed with sapphire and ultramarine, of the waters, would in themselves afford a multiplicity of rich and beautiful effects; but to these we must add the magical influences of the coruscations of the Arctic heavens, with the glories of the midnight sun and the wonders of the Aurora. [Illustration: MOONLIGHT IN THE POLAR WORLD.]