Thence the steamer carried her to Copenhagen,
a city of which she speaks in favourable terms. She notices its numerous
splendid palaces; its large and regular squares; its broad and handsome
promenades. At the Museum of Art she was interested by the chair which
Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, formerly used; and at the Thorvaldsen
Museum, the colossal lion executed by the great Danish sculptor. Having
seen all that was to be seen, she took ship for Iceland, passing
Helsingborg on the Swedish coast, and Elsinore on the Danish, the latter
associated with Shakespeare's "Hamlet;" and, through the Sound and the
Cattegat, entering upon the restless waters of the North Sea. Iceland
came in sight on the seventh day of a boisterous voyage, which had tried
our traveller somewhat severely; and at the close of the eleventh day she
reached Havenfiord, an excellent harbour, two miles from Reikiavik, the
capital of Iceland.
Her first impressions of the Icelandic coast, she says, were very
different from the descriptions she had read in books. She had conceived
of a barren desolate waste, shrubless and treeless; and she saw grassy
hillocks, leafy copses, and even, as she thought, patches of dwarfish
woods. But as she drew nearer, and could distinguish the different
objects more plainly, the hillocks were transformed into human
habitations, with small doors and windows; and the groups of trees proved
to be huge lava masses, from ten to fifteen feet in height, entirely
overgrown with verdure and moss.
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