e goes to inspect the
sea-fowl from islet to islet of the fiord, or carries out his nets or
his rod to catch the sea-trout or char, or cod, or herrings, which
abound, in their seasons, on the coast of Norway.

It is difficult to say whether these fiords are the most beautiful in
summer or in winter. In summer, they glitter with golden sunshine; and
purple and green shadows from the mountain and forest lie on them; and
these may be more lovely than the faint light of the winter noons of
those latitudes, and the snowy pictures of frozen peaks which then show
themselves on the surface: but before the day is half over, out come the
stars,--the glorious stars which shine like nothing that we have ever
seen. There, the planets cast a faint shadow, as the young moon does
with us: and these planets, and the constellations of the sky, as they
silently glide over from peak to peak of these rocky passes, are imaged
on the waters so clearly that the fisherman, as he unmoors his boat for
his evening task, feels as if he were about to shoot forth his vessel
into another heaven, and to cleave his way among the stars.

Still as everything is to the eye, sometimes for a hundred miles
together along these deep sea-valleys, there is rarely silence. The ear
is kept awake by a thousand voices. In the summer, there are cataracts
leaping from ledge to ledge of the rocks; and there is the bleating of
the kids that browse there, and the flap of the great eagle's wings, as
it dashes abroad from its eyrie, and the cries of whole clouds of
sea-birds which inhabit the islets; and all these sounds are mingled and
multiplied by the strong echoes, till they become a din as loud as that
of a city. Even at night, when the flocks are in the fold, and the
birds at roost, and the echoes themselves seem to be asleep, there is
occasionally a sweet music heard, too soft for even the listening ear to
catch by day. Every breath of summer wind that steals through the
pine-forests wakes this music as it goes. The stiff spiny leaves of the
fir and pine vibrate with the breeze, like the strings of a musical
instrument, so that every breath of the night-wind, in a Norwegian
forest, wakens a myriad of tiny harps; and this gentle and mournful
music may be heard in gushes the whole night through. This music, of
course, ceases when each tree becomes laden with snow; but yet there is
sound, in the midst of the longest winter night. There is the rumble of
some a