We quarrel not with authors for dwelling on the tremendous and the awful. Too much cannot be said on these points; but while they do not by any means paint the dark side of their picture too black, they fail to touch in the lights with sufficient brilliancy. We have had some personal experience of the arctic regions, and have found it extremely difficult to get many persons--even educated men and women--to understand that there _is_ a summer there, though a short one; that in many places it is an uncommonly hot and excessively brilliant summer; and that the sun, as if to make amends for its prolonged absence in winter, shines all night as well as all day, blazing on the crystal icebergs and pure snow (which _never_ disappear from those seas) with a degree of splendour that renders the far north transcendently beautiful and pre-eminently attractive. We admit freely that the prevailing character of arctic seas, during the greater part of the year, is dark, gloomy, forbidding. But this is the very reason why their brief but cheering smiles should be brought prominently into the foreground, and, if they cannot in justice be dwelt on long, at least be touched upon with emphasis. Why, in some of our cyclopaedia accounts of the realms of "thick-ribbed ice," so much prominence is given to "the horrors and wide desolation of the scene," and so much graphic power is expended in working up the reader's imagination to a conception of the dreadful dangers and the appalling terrors that await the madman who should dare to venture within the arctic circle, that persons who have not been there might well be tempted to shrink in affright from the very contemplation of a region in which there does not appear to be one redeeming quality. We repeat, that we do not think the one side of the picture has been too darkly painted,--but the other side has been painted too slightly. At the same time, we would caution our readers against jumping to the opposite extreme. The dark side of the picture is in reality out of all proportion to the light. And we do not hesitate to state our confirmed opinion, that the arctic regions are more interesting to read about than pleasant to dwell in. Having, then, defended the lights, let us commence our investigations with the shadows. Those oceans lying within the arctic circle exhibit phenomena so grand, so wonderful, and so varied, that they claim distinct and separate treatment from the ocean as a whole. Here the extreme cold acts with such power, and produces such extraordinary results, that it is difficult to find words or similes by which to convey a just conception of nature's aspects to the general reader.