1 This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years.
2 You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily I bore the disappointment.
3 I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise.
4 There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour.
5 These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul and lifted it to heaven.
6 But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent.
7 You may remember that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good Uncle Thomas' library.
8 Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes.
9 You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
10 I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
11 I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
12 I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
13 I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole.
14 I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
15 I also became a poet and for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.
16 These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river.
17 But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.
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