332 NATURAL HISTORY 
to be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and 
part of the Isle of Sicily were torn and convulsed 
with earthquakes, and about that juncture a volcano 
sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway. 
On this occasion Milton’s noble simile of the sun, 
in his first book of Paradise Lost, frequently oc- 
curred to my mind ; and it is indeed particularly 
applicable, because towards the end it alludes to a 
superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds 
of men are always impressed by such strange and 
unusual phenomena : 
_ “ As when the sun, new risen, 
Looks through the horizontal misty air 
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon, 
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with fear of change ~ 
Perplexes monarchs.” 
LETTER LXIt. 
We are very seldom annoyed with thunder. 
storms; and it is no less remarkable than true, that 
those which arise in the south have hardly been 
known to reach this village; for before they get 
over us, they take a direction to the east or to the 
west, or sometimes divide into two, and go in part 
to one of those quarters, and in part to the other, 
as was truly the case in summer, 1783, when, though 
the country round was continually harassed with 
tempests, and often from the south, yet we escaped 
them all, as appears by my journal of that summer. 
The only way that I can at all account for this fact 
—for such it is—is, that on that quarter between 
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