six months, and renders them more pleasant and convenient than they are in summer or autumn; at which seasons, partly on account of the pavement, and partly on account of the dirt, they are often almost impassable. One layer of snow on another, hardened by the frost, forms a surface more equal and agreeable to walk on, which is sometimes raised more than a yard above the stones of the street. You are no longer stunned by the irksome noise of carriage-wheels; but this is exchanged for the tinkling of little bells, with which they deck their horses before the sledges. The only wheels now to be seen in Stockholm (says Acerbi) are those of small carts, employed by men-servants of families to fetch water from the pump in a cask.

'This compound of cart and cask always struck me as a very curious and extraordinary object; insomuch that I have taken the trouble of following it, in order to have a nearer view of the whimsical robe in which the frost had invested it, and particularly of the variegated and fantastical drapery in which the wheels were covered and adorned. This vehicle, with all its appurtenances, afforded to a native of Italy a very singular spectacle. The horse was wrapped up, as it seemed, in a mantle of white down, which, under his breast and belly, was fringed with points and tufts of ice. Stalactical ornaments of the same kind, some of them to the length of a foot, were also attached to his nose and mouth. The servant that attended the cart had on a frock, which was encrusted with a solid mass of ice. His eye-brows and hair jingled with icicles, which were formed by the action of the frost on his breath and perspiration. Sometimes the water in the pump was frozen, so that it became necessary to melt it by the injection of a red-hot bar of iron.

' Neither men nor women carry any thing on their heads or shoulders, but employ small sledges, which they push on before them. When they come to a declivity, they rest with their left hip and thigh on the sledge, and glide down to the bottom with a velocity F

which, to a stranger, appears both astonishing and frightful, guiding all the while the motion of the sledge with their right foot. The address with which they perform this it is not easy for any one to conceive who has not witnessed it. If you add to the objects which I have been describing, the curious appearance of the many different pelisses that are worn with the fur on the outside, you will imagine what a striking scene the streets of Stockholm present in winter to a foreigner, especially to one that came from the southern part of Europe.'

Ice Islands are composed of a great quantity of ice collected into one huge solid mass, and floating about upon the seas near or within the Polar circles. Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coasts of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the shipping employed in the Greenland fishery. In the midst. of those tremendous masses navigators have been arrested, and frozen to death. In this manner the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished with all his crew, in 1553; a circumstance thus affectingly alluded to by THOMSON :

Miserable they!

Who here entangled in the gathering ice,
Take their last look of the descending sun;

While, full of death, and fierce with ten-fold frost,
The long, long night incumbent o'er their heads,
Falls horrible. Such was the Briton's fate,

As with first prow (what have not Britons dared!)
He for the passage sought, attempted since
So much in vain, and seeming to be shut
By jealous Nature with eternal bars.
In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
And to the stony deep his idle ship
Immediate sealed, he with his hapless crew,
Each full exerted at his several task,
Froze into statues; to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to the helm.

And, in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most finished seaman could make to accomplish the end of his voyage, was caught in the

ice, and was near experiencing the same unhappy fate. See the account at large in Phipps's Voyage to the North Pole. As there described, the scene, divested of the horror from the eventful expectation of change, was the most beautiful and picturesque.

Two large ships becalmed in a vast bason, surrounded on all sides by islands of various forms; the weather clear; the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was low, smooth, and even; covered with snow, excepting where the pools of water, on part of the surface, appeared crystalline with the young ice; the small space of sea they were confined in perfectly smooth. After fruitless attempts to force a way through the fields of ice, their limits were perpetually contracted by its closing; till at length it beset each vessel till they became immoveably fixed. The smooth extent of surface was soon lost: the pressure of the pieces of ice, by the violence of the swell, caused them to pack fragment rose upon fragment, till they were in many places higher than the main-yard. The movements of the ships were tremendous and involuntary, in conjunction with the surrounding ice, actuated by the currents. The water shoaled to fourteen fathoms. The grounding of the ice or of the ships would have been equally fatal: the force of the ice might have crushed them to atoms, or have lifted them out of the water, and overset them-or have left them suspended on the summits of the pieces of ice, at a tremendous height, exposed to the fury of the winds, or to the risk of being dashed to pieces by the failure of their frozen dock.

An attempt was made to cut a passage through the ice: after a perseverance worthy of Britons, it proved fruitless. The commander, at all times master of himself, directed the boats to be made ready to be hauled over the ice, till they arrived at navigable water, (a task alone of seven days), and in them to make their voyage to England. The boats were drawn progressively three whole days. At length, a wind

sprung up, the ice separated sufficiently to yield to the pressure of the full-sailed ships, which, after labouring against the resisting fields of ice, arrived, on the 10th of August, in the harbour of Smeeringberg, at the west end of Spitzbergen, between it and Hackluyt's headland.

Cowper has some lines on the ice-islands seen floating in the German ocean; we quote a part only of his pleasing description

Like burnished brass they shine, or beaten gold;
And all around the pearl's pure splendour show,
And all around the ruby's fiery glow.

Come they from India, where the burning earth,
All bounteous, gives her richest treasures birth;
And where the costly gems, that beam around
The brows of mightiest potentates, are found?
No. Never such a countless, dazzling store
Had left, unseen, the Ganges' peopled shore.
Rapacious hands, and ever-watchful eyes,
Should sooner far have marked and seized the prize.
Whence sprang they then? Ejected have they come
From Ves'vius, or from Ætna's burning womb ?
Thus shine they self-illumed, or but display
The borrowed splendors of a cloudless day?

With borrowed beams they shine. The gales that breathe
Now landward, and the current's force beneath,
Have borne them nearer: and the nearer sight
Advantaged more, contemplates them aright.
Their lofty summits crested high, they show,
With mingled sleet, and long-incumbent snow,
The rest is ice. Far hence, where, most severe,
Bleak winter well-nigh saddens all the year,
Their infant growth began. He bade arise
Their uncouth forms, portentous in our eyes.
Oft, as dissolved by transient suns, the snow
Left the tall cliff to join the floods below;
He caught, and curdled with a freezing blast
The current, ere it reached the boundless waste.

Poems, vol. iii, p. 271.

For a description of ice-hills, and ice-palaces, see T. T. for 1814, p. 25. Some account of the tremendous frost of 1814 will be found in T. T. for 1815, p. 34. See also a description of the Frozen Market at St. Petersburgh, and some curious anecdotes of

northern winters, in the same volume, pp. 71-74. For an account of ice-islands, snow-slips, glaciers, icebergs, blink of the ice, ice-boat, &c. &c. &c., we refer to a pocket volume, entitled Frostiana, and published at the time of the last great frost.

Description of Forest Trees.

[Continued from p. 39.]

BEECH (fagus sylvatica).—The beech is the most beautiful tree our island produces. In stateliness and grandeur of outline, it vies with the oak. Its foliage is peculiarly delicate and pleasing to the eye, and therefore preferable to the lime, for ornamental plantations, particularly in parks, where the mast, in fruitful years, will be serviceable to the deer: its branches are numerous and spreading, and its stem grows to a great size.

The bark is extremely smooth and silvery, which, together with the elegance of its foliage, gives a pleasing neatness and delicacy to its general appearance'.

The BEECH TREE'S PETITION.

O leave this barren spot to me!

Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree!
Though bush or flow'ret never grow
My dark, unwarming shade below;
Nor summer bud perfume the dew
Of rosy blush, or yellow hue;
Nor fruits of Autumn, blossom-born,
My green and glossy leaves adorn ;
Nor murm'ring tribes from me derive
Th' ambrosial amber of the hive;
Yet leave this barren spot to me:
Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree!
Thrice twenty summers I have seen
The sky grow bright, the forest green;
And many a wintery wind have stood
In bloomless, fruitless solitude,
Since childhood in my pleasant bower
First spent its sweet and sportive hour;
Siuce youthful lovers in my shade
Their vows of truth and rapture made;