more unto the perfect day.' If with it came the remembrance of his
vision of the threads of light, it was not a recollection which would
lead to repining.

And when at Cape Horn, a mighty ice mountain drifted within view,
spired, pinnacled, encrusted with whiteness, rivalled only by the
glory of the summer cloud, caverned here and there into hollows of
sapphire blue, too deeply dazzling to behold, or rising into peaks of
clear, hard, chill green; the wild fantastic points sometimes
glimmering with fragments of the rainbow arch; the rich variety,
endless beyond measure in form and colouring, and not only
magnificent and terrible in the whole maas, but lovely beyond
imagination in each crystal too minute for the eye. Mary had once,
on a like occasion, only said, 'it was very cold;' and looked to see
whether the captain expected the monster to bear down on the ship.
But the present iceberg put her in mind of the sublime aspirations
which gothic cathedrals seem as if they would fain embody. And then,
she thought of the marvellous interminable waste of beauty of those
untrodden regions, whence yonder enormous iceberg was but a small
fragment--a petty messenger--regions unseen by human eye--beauty
untouched by human hand-the glory, the sameness, yet the infinite
variety of perfect purity. Did it not seem, with all the
associations of cold, of peril, of dreariness, to be a visible token
that indeed He who fashioned it could prepare 'good things past man's
understanding!'

It was well for Mary that southern constellations, snowy, white-
winged albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-
coast, had been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and
less personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but