heightened by a strong gale from the west, rises high on the beach; the consolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps slowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and, finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous zoophites. The many-colored Acalephae float by; the many-armed Sepiadae shoot over; while shells that love the profounder depths,--the black Modiola and delicate Anomia,--anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thickets of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course, Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and furrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passes away; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comes another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is over. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; and each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely altered its features: it exists no longer as a broken archipelago, scantily covered by a semi-arctic vegetation, but as a continuous land, still whitened, where the great valleys open to the sea, by the pale gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored coat of the wild bull,--a speck of white relieved against a ground of dingy green,--may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.