The whole glacier system of Greenland was here spread out before me in miniature. A lofty mountain ridge, like a whale's back, held in check the expanding _mer de glace_, but a broad cleft cut it in twain, and the stream before me had burst through the opening like cataract rapids tumbling from the pent-up waters of a lake. The sublimity and picturesqueness of the scene was greatly heightened by two parallel rocky ridges, whose crests were to the left of the glacier. These crests are trap-dykes, left standing fifty feet perhaps above the sloping hill-side below them, by the wasting away of the sandstone through which they have forced their way in some great convulsion of Nature. On the day following, I visited this glacier and made a careful examination of it, pulling first along its front in a boat and then mounting to its surface. [Sidenote: GOTHIC GLACIER.] It would be difficult to imagine any thing more startling to the imagination or more suggestive to the mind than the scene presented by this two miles of ice coast-line, as I rowed along within a few fathoms of it. The glacier was broken up into the most singular shapes, and presented nothing of that uniformity usual to the glacier's face. It was worn and wasted away until it seemed like the front of some vast incongruous temple,--here a groined roof of some huge cathedral, and there a pointed window or a Norman door-way deeply molded; while on all sides were pillars round and fluted, and pendants dripping crystal drops of the purest water, and all bathed in a soft, blue atmosphere. Above these wondrous archways and galleries there was still preserved the same Gothic character,--tall spires and pinnacles rose along the entire front and multiplied behind them, and new forms met the eye continually. The play of light and the magical softness of the color of the sea and ice was perfectly charming, as the scene I have heretofore described among the icebergs. Strange, there was nothing cold or forbidding anywhere. The ice seemed to take the warmth which suffused the air, and I longed to pull my boat far within the openings, and paddle beneath the Gothic archways. The dangers from falling ice alone prevented me from entering one of the largest of them. [Sidenote: GLACIER STREAM.]