2.—ON THE MORAINE OF THE GREAT TASMAN GLACIER.

Otago Witness, Issue 1981, 11 February 1892, Page 43

2.— ON THE MORAINE OF THE GREAT TASMAN GLACIER.

The description of this place should be in prose — prose such as that through which we catch the majesty of Hebrew prophet and psalmist; such as that which raises Milton's sublimest passages high above poetry. For here the loftiest spirit of feigning stands appalled; here imagination is out-soared, and only an unspeakable wonder possesses soul and mind. Faith alters before the evidences of mighty works and uncounted ages, and religion would vainly interpret the oracles of rock and stone, and ice and snow. What spirit toils here night and day, restlessly, unceasingly 7 The great glacier with its billowy mounds of ice is travelling on, inch by inch. Ceaselessly the blue streams j run from its side, the white crevasses widen and deepen; from moment to moment there fall blocks of ice and loosened boulders down the frozen cliffs ; far off on the distant peaks the avalanches sweep from the piled ridges of the snow, and are gone. Old glaciers have vanished, rivers have changed their courses, the solid mountains have been shaken and rent with chasms and clefts ; still they toil and strive. Here is ceaseless change, motion, and sound, — sound ,of the cataract and the river, shrieks of the kea at night, echoes from the moraine's steep walls of stones. Is there not here a life that mocks ;our breath ?— a life neither all good -for what beneficence could produce such works of terror and destruction ? — nor all lovely, for that valley of stones is desolate alike in the blaze of noon and in the whiteness of moonlight — yet always and for ever mightier than we, having power to destroy the body, to astound the mind and trouble the soul. That the life of these mountains is other than ours, this we know ; but who dare name that life inferior ? Who on this glacier's verge, where all the silent peaks stand ranged white and invincible against the blue heaven, who would not bow the head, acknowledging human insignificance and the might of these mountains which it is indeed permitted us to gaze upon but never to comprehend ?