of

great fiord which stretches nearly a hundred miles into the heart of Lapland. Its shores are high and mountainous hills, half covered with snow, and barren of vegetation except patches grass and moss. If once wooded, the trees have long since disappeared, and now nothing can be more bleak and desolate. Running along under the eastern shore, we exchanged the dreadful monotony through which we had been sailing, for more rugged and picturesque scenery.

4. Before us rose a wall of dark cliff, from five to six hundred feet in hight, gaping here and there with sharp clefts or gashes, as if it had cracked in cooling, after the primeval fires. As we approached the end of the promontory which divides the fiords, the rocks became more abrupt and violently shattered. Huge masses, fallen from the summit, lined the base of the precipice, which was hollowed into cavernous arches, the home of myriads of sea-gulls.

5. Far to the north, the sun lay in a bed of saffron light, over the clear horizon of the Arctic ocean. A few bars of dazzling orange cloud floated above him; and, still higher in the sky, where the saffron melted through delicate rose-color into blue, hung light wreaths of vapor, touched with pearly, opaline flushes of pink and golden gray. The sea was a web of pale slate-color, shot through and through with threads of orange and saffron, from the dance of a myriad shifting and twinkling ripples.

6. The air was filled and permeated with the soft, mysterious glow, and even the very azure of the southern sky seemed to shine through a net of golden gauze. The headlands of this deeply-indented coast lay around us, in different degrees of distance, but all with foreheads touched with supernatural glory. Far to the north-east was the most northern point of the mainland of Europe, gleaming rosily and faint in the full beams of the sun, and, just as our watches denoted midnight, the North Cape appeared to the westward-a long line of purple bluff, presenting a vertical front of nine hundred feet in hight to the Polar Sea.

7. Midway between these two magnificent headlands stood the

MIDNIGHT SUN, shining on us with subdued fires, and with the gorgeous coloring of an hour, for which we have no name, since it is neither sunset nor sunrise, but the blended loveliness of both-but shining, at the same moment, in the heat and splendor of noonday, on the Pacific isles. This was the Midnight

Sun as I had dreamed it—as I had hoped to see it.

8. We ran out under the northern headland, which again charmed us with a glory peculiarly its own. Here the colors were a part of the substance of the rock, and the sun but hightened and harmonized their tones. The huge projecting masses of pale yellow had a mellow gleam, like golden chalk; behindthem were cliffs, violet in shadow; broad strata of soft red, tipped on the edges with vermilion; thinner layers, which shot up vertically to the hight of four or five hundred feet, and striped the splendid sea-wall with lines of bronze, orange, brown, and dark red, while great rents and breaks interrupted. these marvelous frescoes with their dashes of uncertain gloom.

9. I have seen many wonderful aspects of nature, in many lands, but rock-painting, such as this, I never beheld. A part of its effects may have been owing to atmospheric conditions which must be rare, even in the North; but, without such embellishments, I think the sight of this coast will nobly repay any one for continuing his voyage beyond Hammerfest. We lingered on deck, as point after point revealed some change in the dazzling diorama, uncertain which was finest, and whether something still grander might not be in store. But the northeast wind blew keenly across the Arctic ocean, and we were both satisfied and fatigued enough to go to bed. It was the most northern point of our voyage, about 71° 20′, which is further north than I ever was before, or ever wish to be again.

LESSON VI.

EXPLANATORY NOTES.-1. JOHN MIL' TON, one of the most eminent of English poets, was born in London, on the 9th of December, 1608. His most celebrated production is entitled, Paradise Lost, an epic poem which ranks him with Homer, Virgil, and Tasso. He is, hardly, less distinguished as a prose writer. He died in November, 1674.

2. DAN' TE, a most celebrated Italian poet, was born in Florence, May 27th, 1265. The Italians justly regard him as the creator of their poeti cal language, and the father of their poetry. He died at Ravenna, September 14th, 1321.

ARCTIC SCENERY.

DR. E. K. KANE.

1. TO-DAY, February 21, the crests of the north-east headland were gilded by true sunshine, and all who were able, assembled on deck to greet it. The sun rose above the horizon, though still screened from our eyes by intervening hills. Although the powerful refraction of polar latitudes heralds his direct appearance by brilliant light, this is as far removed from the glorious tints of day, as it is from the mere twilight.

2. Nevertheless, for the past ten days, we have been watching the growing warmth of our landscape, as it emerged from buried shadow, through all the stages of distinctness of an India ink washing, step by step, into the snarp, bold definition of our desolate harbor scene. We have marked every dash of color which the great Painter, in IIis benevolence, vouchsafed to us, and now the empurpled blues, clear, unmistakable, the spreading lake, the flickering yellow,-peering at all these, poor wretches! every thing seemed superlative luster and unsurpassable glory. We had so groveled in darkness that we oversaw the light.

* *

3. To-day, February 25, blessed be the Great Author of Light! I have once more looked upon the sun. I was standing on deck, thinking over our prospects, when a familiar berg, which had long been hid in shadow, flashed out in sun-birth. I knew this berg right well. It stood between Charlotte Wood Fiord and little Willie's monument. One year and one day ago I traveled toward it from Fern Rock, to catch the sunshine. Then, I had to climb the hills beyond, to get the luxury of basking in its brightness; but now, though the sun was but a single degree above the true horizon, it was so much elevated by refraction that the sheen stretched across the trough of the fiord like a flaming tongue. I could not or would not resist the influence. It was a Sunday act of worship. I started off at an even run, and caught him as he rolled slowly along

the horizon, and before he sank. I was again the first of my party to rejoice and meditate in sunshine. It is the third sun I have seen rise, for a moment, above the long night of an Arctic winter.

4. March 1.-A grander scene than our bay by moonlight can hardly be conceived. It is more dream-like and supernatural than a combination of earthly features. The moon is nearly full, and the dawning sunlight, mingling with hers, invests every thing with an atmosphere of ashy gray. It clothes the gnarled hills that make the horizon of our bay, shadows out the terraces in dull definition, grows darker and colder as it sinks into the fiords, and broods, sad and dreary, upon the ridges and measureless plains of ice that make up the rest of our field of view.

5. Rising above all this, and shading down into it in strange combination, is the intense moonlight, glittering on every crag and spire, tracing the outline of the background with contrasted brightness, and printing its fantastic profiles on the snow-field. It is a landscape such as Milton' or Dante' might imagine-inorganic, desolate, mysterious. I have come down from deck with the feelings of a man who has looked upon a world unfinished by the hand of its Creator.

LESSON VII.

FIRST REVOLUTION OF THE HEAVENS WITNESSED

BY MAN.

PROF. O. M. MITCHEL.

1. FAR away from the earth on which we dwell, in the blue. ocean of space, thousands of bright orbs, in clusterings and configurations of exceeding beauty, invite the upward gaze of man, and tempt him to the examination of the wonderful sphere by which he is surrounded. The starry heavens do not display their glittering constellations in the glare of day, while the rush and turmoil of business incapacitate man for the enjoyment of their solemn grandeur. It is in the stillness of the midnight hour, when all nature is hushed in reposc, when the hum of the

world's ou-going is no longer heard, that the planets roll and shine, and the bright stars, trooping through the deep heavens, speak to the willing spirit that would learn their mysterious being.

2. Often have I swept backward in imagination six thousand years, and stood beside our Great Ancestor, as he gazed, for the first time, upon the going down of the sun. What strange sensations must have swept through his bewildered mind, as he watched the last departing ray of the sinking orb, unconscious whether he should ever behold its return! Wrapt in a maze of thought, strange and startling, his eye long lingers about the point, at which the sun had slowly faded from his view.

3. A mysterious darkness, hitherto unexperienced, creeps over the face of nature. The beautiful scenes of earth, which, through the swift hours of the first wonderful day of his existence, had so charmed his senses, are slowly fading, one by one, from his dimmed vision. A gloom deeper than that which covers earth, steals across the mind of earth's solitary inhabitant. He raises his inquiring gaze toward heaven, and lo! a silver crescent of light, clear and beautiful, hanging in the western sky, meets his astonished eye. The young moon charms his untutored vision, and leads him upward to her bright attendants, which are now stealing, one by one, from out the deep blue sky. The solitary gazer bows, and wonders, and adores.

4. The hours glide by,-the silver moon is gone,-the stars are rising, slowly ascending the hights of heaven,-and solemnly sweeping downward in the stillness of the night. The first grand revolution to mortal vision is nearly completed. A faint streak of rosy light is seen in the east,-it brightens,-the stars fade,―the planets are extinguished, the eye is fixed in mute astonishment on the growing splendor, till the first rays of the returning sun dart their radiance on the young earth and its solitary inhabitant. To him "the evening and the morning were the first day."

5. The curiosity excited on this first solemn night, the con