Page:Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, vol. 3 (1826).djvu/10

nearly lost; and in that neighbourhood the unfortunate King George was last seen, still gathering fresh miseries, till some unknown catastrophe terminated its career. Alas, poor Proven! again do I offer a tribute of regret that you, who generously braved the superstitions of the amphibious herd of mankind, to console the friends of a departed ship-mate, by depositing his corpse within the earth of his native country, should have been destined to perish fearfully, amidst the desolation of an icy shipwreck. Little dream the gay revellers, who tread with security over lawn or carpet, that, while they are joyfully basking in sunshine and smiles, hundreds are struggling with death, armed in his wildest terrors; and scarcely can those who have suffered the rage of the ocean, and shrunk beneath the blast, conceive the horrors added to the tempest by the crash of vast fields of ice, meeting in headlong fury, and crushing every smaller body to atoms. The sound is hideous—appalling—inexpressibly dreadful—but the sight of these huge masses, whirling round, like solid clouds upon a fluid sky, deforming and overwhelming each other in blind wantonness of destruction, is sublimely, though perilously, grand. Never can man feel himself so much