The title-page alone would serve for a preface to the present volume. It is the record of a voyage, during the summer of 1859, in company with a distinguished landscape painter, along the north-eastern coast of British America, for the purpose of studying and sketching icebergs.

It was thought, at first, that the shores in the neighborhood of St. Johns, Newfoundland, upon which many bergs are often floated in, would afford all facilities. It was found, however, upon experiment, that they did not. Icebergs were too few for the requisite variety; too scattered to be reached conveniently; and too distant to be minutely examined from land. One needed to be in the midst of them, where he could command views, near or remote, of all sides of them, at all hours of the day and evening.

For that purpose a small vessel was hired to take us to Labrador. Favoring circumstances directed us to Battle Harbor, near Cape St. Louis, in the waters of which icebergs, and all facilities for sketching them, abounded.

To diversify the journey, we returned through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coasting the west of Newfoundland, and the shores of Cape Breton, and concluding with a ride across the island, and through Nova Scotia to the Bay of Fundy.

If the writer has succeeded in picturing to his reader, with some freshness, what he saw and felt, then will the purpose of the book, made from notes pencilled rapidly, have been accomplished.

L. L. N.

Hudson, New Jersey,

March, 1861.

AFTER ICEBERGS WITH A PAINTER.

COOL AND NOVEL.

“After icebergs!” exclaims a prudent, but imaginary person, as I pencil the title on the front leaf of my note-book.

“Why, after deer and trout among the Adirondack Mountains with John Cheeney, the Leather-stocking of those wilds, who kills his moose and panther with a pistol; or after salmon on the Jaques Cartier and Saguenay, is thought to be quite enough for your summer tourist.

“After buffalo is almost too much for any not at home in the great unfenced, Uncle Sam’s continental parks, where he pastures his herds, and waters them in the Platte and Colorado, and walls out the Pacific with the Rocky Mountains. He is rather a fast hunter who indulges in the chase in those fair fields. It is no boy’s play to commit yourself to mule and horse, the yawls of the prairie, riding yourself sore and thirsty over the gracefully rolling, never-breaking swells, the green seas sparkling with dewy flowers, but never coming ashore. The ocean done up in solid land is weary voyaging to one whose youthful footsteps were over the fields, to the sound of sabbath bells.

“After ostriches, with the ship of the desert, although rather a hot chase for John and Jonathan over broad sands, yellow with the sunshine of centuries, and the bird speeding on legs swift as the spokes of the rapid wheels, is, nevertheless, a pleasure enjoyed now and then.

“But after icebergs is certainly a cool, if not a novel and perilous adventure. A few climb to the ices of the Andes; but after the ices of Greenland, except by leave of government or your merchant prince, is entirely another thing.

“You will do well to recollect, that nature works in other ways in the high north than in the high Cordilleras and Alps, and especially in the latter, where she carefully slides her mer-de-glace into the warm valley, and gently melts it off, letting it run merrily and freely to the sea, every crystal fetter broken into silvery foam. But in Greenland she heaves her mile-wide glacier, in all its flinty hardness, into the great deep bodily, and sends it, both a glory and a terror, to flourish or perish as the currents of the solemn main move it to wintry or to summer climes. After icebergs! Weigh well the perils and the pleasures of this new summer hunting.”

“We have weighed them, I confess, not very carefully; only ‘hefting’ them a little, just enough to help us to a guess that both are somewhat heavier than the ordinary delights and dangers of sporting nearer home. But, Prudens, my good friend, consider the ancient saw, ‘Nothing venture nothing have.’ Not in the least weary of the old, we would yet have something new, altogether new. You shall seek the beauties of scales and of plumage, and the graces of motion and the wild music of voices, among the creatures of the brooks and woodlands. Our game, for once, is the wandering alp of the waves; our wilderness, the ocean; our steed, the winged vessel; our arms, the pencil and the pen; our game-bags, the portfolio, painting-box, and note-book, all harmless instruments, you perceive, with mild report. It is seldom that they are heard at any distance, although, at intervals, the sound has gone out as far as the guns of the battle-field.

“Should we have the sport we anticipate, you may see the rarest specimen of our luck preserved in oil and colors, a method peculiar to those few, who intend their articles less for the market than for immortality, as men call the dim glimmering of things in the dusky reaches of the past.

“But you shall hear from us, from time to time, if possible, how we speed in our grand hunt, and how the pleasures and the risks make the scale of our experience vibrate. Within a few minutes, we shall be on our way to Boston, darting across grassy New England, regardless as the riders of the steeple-chase of cliff and gulf, fence, wall and river, with a velocity of wheels that would set the coach on fire, did not ingenuity stand over the axles putting out the flame with oil.

“This evening, we meet a choice few in one of those bowery spots of Brookline, where intelligence dwells with taste and virtue, and talk of our excursion.

“To-morrow, amid leave-takings, smiles and tears, and the waving of handkerchiefs, of which we shall be only quiet spectators, with the odor of our first sea-dinner seasoning the brief excitement of the scene, and all handsomely rounded off with the quick thunder of the parting gun, we sail, at noon, in the America.”