The Regent of the North

The northern winter is altogether ghostly and elemental; there is no
friendliness to man to be found in it. There, the snow has its proper
habitation; there, in the gaunt valleys of Lapland, in the terrible,
lonely desolations, the Frost Giants abide. They are servants of the
Regent of the North: smiths, that have the awful mountains for their
anvils; and, with cold for flame tempering water into hardness, fashion
spears and swords of piercing ice, or raise glittering ramparts about the
Pole. All for the dreadful pleasure of doing it! They go about their work
silently in the gray darkness; heaven knows what dreams may be haunting
them--dreams that no mind could imagine, unless death had already frozen
its brain. When the wind wolves come howling down from the Pole,
innumerous, unflagging, and insatiable: when the snow drives down, a
horde of ghosts wandering senseless, hurrying and hurrying through the
night: the giants do their work. They make no sound: they fashion terror,
and illimitable terror, and terror....Or--is it indeed only terror that
they fashion?...