Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Side 67

Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses  - 15.12.1903, Side 67
NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS 57 of matchless purity, there is much to admire in the rich meads and leas stretching to meet the light-blue waves; in the fretted and angular outlines of the caverned hills, the abodes of giant and dwarf; in the towering walls of huge horizontal steps which define the fjords, and in the immense vistas of silvery cupolas, ‘cravatted’ cones and snow-capped mulls, which blend and melt with ravishing reflections of ethereal pink, blue, azure, and lilac, into the grey and neutral tints of the horizon. And often there is the most picturesque of contrasts: summer basking below, and winter raging above; peace brooding upon the vale, and elemental war doing fierce battle upon the eternal snows and ice of the upper world.” The natural Wonders of Iceland.—When a traveller in the arctic Thule returns home and becomes reminiscent, it is difficult for him to avoid the language of exaggeration. If he has sailed all around the island, and has, besides, wandered up and down its interior, he has seen a new world, has ob- served a surprising number of new objects, and has lived through a new life. If it be not all beautiful, it is all fascinating — although sometimes with the fascination of awe. For there is no country, travelled of man, which combines as Iceland does, the antag- onistic marvels of frost and steam, of ice and fire, of gloom and colour, of darkness and light. It is, on the whole, une- qualled in all Europe for its gushing fountains of seething water, for its stupendous streams of lava, for its vast volumes of milk-white torrents plunging over grim and swarthy rocks, for the varied, weird and fantastic forms of its mountains, for the intense green of its meads and lowlands and often of its climbing slopes, for the luminous tints of its peaks, for the splendors of its heavens, and for the gray, overawing desolation Poured out by its volcanoes. Landing, let us say, in the later May or the earlier June, the tourist is at first dazzled by the glory of continuous daylight. But his eye soon accepts, with contented pleasure, the unwonted radiance, once he has got

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