pp. 36-39, we subjoin a poetical description of the tremendous icebergs of Greeenland, with remarks on some other singular phenomena of the arctic regions. O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,

The ice-blink rears its undulated head,

On which the sun, beyond th' horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluid strides the Alpine bridge;
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries of the sky;
With glacier battlements, that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,
Winter's eternal palace, built by time:

All human creatures by his touch are borne

Down to the dust;-mountains themselves are worn
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,

Amid the region of unmelting snows,

A monument; where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls;
The sun beholds no mirror in his race
That shows a brighter image of his face;
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals;
Beneath, the tide with idle fury raves

To undermine it through a thousand waves;

Rent from its roof, though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulph, immoveable aloft;
From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,
Its turrets heighten and its piers expand.

MONTGOMERY'S GREENLAND.

Dense fogs, which frequently brood over the sea and land, are among the atmospheric phenomena of the Arctic Regions; their effect is often such as not only to render the needle's motion sluggish,_but sometimes even wholly to arrest its activity. This occurred to Capt. Fox, in 1631, when on a voyage to discover the north-west passage: at Nottingham Island (in Hudson's Bay), he found that the needle had lost its power. One of these thick fogs and its singular effects is thus beautifully described by Mr. Montgomery:

The Sun retires,

Not as he wont, with clear and golden fires;
Bewildered in a labyrinth of haze,

His orb redoubled, with discoloured rays
Struggles and vanishes ;—along the deep,
With slow array, expanding vapours creep,
Whose folds, in twilight's yellow glare uncurled,
Present the dreams of an unreal world;
Islands in air suspended; marching ghosts
Of armies, shapes of castles, winding coasts,
Navies at anchor, mountains, woods, and streams,
Where all is strange, and nothing what it seems;
Till deep involving gloom, without a spark
Of star, moon, meteor, desolately dark,
Seals up the vision:-then the pilot's fears
Slacken his arm; a doubtful course he steers,
Till morning comes, but comes not clad in light;
Uprisen day is but a paler night,

Revealing not a glimpse of sea or sky;

The ship's circumference bounds the sailor's eye.
So cold and dense the impervious fog extends,

He might have touched the point where being ends;
His bark is all the universe; so void

The scene, as though creation were destroyed,
And he and his few mates, of all their race,
Were here becalmed in everlasting space.

MONTGOMERY.

An early traveller to the Arctic Regions, of the name of James, thus describes the severity of the climate of Greenland. We made,' says he 'three differences of the cold, all according to the places. In our house, in the woods, and in the open air, upon the ice in going to our ship. For the last it would be sometimes so extreme that it was not indurable; no clothes were proof against it; no motion could resist it. It would moreover so freeze the hair on our eyelids, that we could not see; and I verily believe it would have stifled a man in a few hours. We did daily find by experience that the cold in the woods would freeze our faces or any part of our flesh that was bare. Our house on the outside was covered three parts with snow, and on the inside frozen and hanged with icicles. The clothes on

our beds would be covered with hoar frost, which in this little habitation was not far from the fire. The cook's tubs, wherein he did water the meat, standing about a yard from the fire, and which he did all day ply with melted snow water; yet in the night season, whilst he slept but one watch, would they be firm frozen to the very bottom. And therefore was he fain to water his meat in a brass kettle adjoining to the fire; and I have many times both seen and felt, by putting my hand into it, that side which was next the fire was very warm, and the other side an inch frozen. The surgeon, who had hung his bottle of syrups and other liquid things as conveniently as he could to preserve them, had them all frozen. Our vinegar, oil, and sack, which we had in a small cask in the house, were all firmly frozen.'

If the earth, however, in this climate is terrific, the heavens often present to the eye a beautiful appearance. Those citadels of light, perhaps our future home,' which decorate the firmament, and which so eloquently declare the glory of God,' shine here with peculiar splendour and in infinite number. Refraction, also, that variation which the rays of light suffer in passing through mediums of different densities, and which causes the heavenly bodies to appear at a greater height than they really are, occasions, likewise, an appearance in the sun and moon, rarely assumed by them in lower latitudes.

By

reason of this influence, they sometimes appear of an oval figure near the horizon; for the under side being more refracted than the upper, the perpendicular diameter is less than the horizontal one, which is not affected by refraction.

The moon is watching in the sky; the stars
Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars;
Ocean, outstretched with infinite expanse,
Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance;
The tide, o'er which no troubling spirits breathe,
Reflects a cloudless firmament beneath;

Where, poised as in the centre of a sphere,
A ship above and ship below appear;
A double image pictured on the deep-
The vessel o'er its shadow seems to sleep;
Yet, like the host of heaven, that never rest,
With evanescent motion to the west
The pageant glides through loneliness and night,
And leaves behind a rippling wake of light,

MONTGOMERY,

FEBRUARY.

OVID, in his Fasti, thus explains the origin of the name of this month; we give the lines from Mr. Massey's Translation:

In antient times, purgations had the name
Of Februa'; various customs prove the same;
The pontiffs from the rex and flamen2 crave
A lock of wool; in former days they gave
To wool the name of Februa.

A pliant branch cut from a lofty pine,

Which round the temples of the priests they twine,
Is Februa called; which if the priest demand,

A branch of pine is put into his hand;

In short, with whatsoe'er our hearts we hold
Are purified, was Februa termed of old;
Lustrations are from hence, from hence the name
Of this our month of February came;

In which the priests of Pan processions made;

1

Varro tells us, that all filth, or dirt, in the antient Sabine language was called Februa; from whence that word was afterwards applied to religious purgations or cleansings.

2 We are informed by Livy, that after the expulsion of the kings, as there were some public sacrifical duties that had been usually performed by the reigning king, the Romans were obliged to institute a priest with that name, who was therefore called Rex Sacrificulus, but (to avoid a bad omen) he was to be subject to the Pontifex Maximus. The Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jupiter. Wool was much used in expiatory sacrifices, to wipe up the blood, &c.

In which the tombs were also purified

Of such as had no dirges' when they died;
For our religions fathers did maintain,
Purgations expiated every stain

Of guilt and sin; from Greece the custom came,
But here adopted by another name;

The Grecians held that pure lustrations could
Efface an impious deed, or guilt of blood.
By Peleus2 was Patroclus purified,

When he his sword in guiltless blood had dyed;
And Peleus self did king Acastus lave
For fratricide in the Hæmonian wave.
Alemæon to the sacred river cried,

O cleanse my guilt! and he was purified;
Weak men! to think that water can make clean
A bloody crime, or any sinful stain.

Remarkable Days

In FEBRUARY 1820.

2.-PURIFICATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY.

THIS festival is of high antiquity, and the antient christians observed it by using a great number of lights; in remembrance, as it is supposed, of our blessed Saviour's being declared by Simeon to be a light to lighten the Gentiles; hence the name of Candlemas Day. It is also called Christ's Presentation,' the Holiday of Saint Simeon,' and, in the north of England, the Wives' Feast-Day.'See T. T. for 1814, p. 28, and for 1815, p. 43, and

'The Romans had a notion, that the ghosts of such persons, as had not been buried with proper rites and ceremonies, hovered about their graves, and thereby occasioned an unhealthy or pestilential air; there fore the festival called feralia, for quieting the manes of the dead, was observed in this month.

Our poet here enumerates several, who thought they were purified from the guilt of shedding innocent blood by certain ceremonious ablutions; and then justly censures the credulity of such as can suppose that any external rites can cleanse men from corrupt and wicked actions, which are formed in the mind; a remark, that breathes more the spirit and genius of christianity than of paganism.