300 SUMMER OF 1783. 



LETTEE CIX. 



TO THE SAME 



THE summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and porten- 

 tous one, and full of horrible phenomena ; for, besides the 

 alarming meteors and tremendous thunder storms that 

 affrighted and distressed the different counties of this king- 

 dom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for 

 many weeks in this island, aud in every part of Europe, and 

 even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, 

 unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my 

 journal, I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence 

 from June 23 to July 20, inclusive, during which period, the 

 wind varied to every quarter, without making any alteration 

 in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as black as a clouded 

 moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the 

 ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and 

 blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time, the heat 

 was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten the 

 day after it was killed ; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes 

 and hedges, that they rendered the horses half frantic, and 

 riding irksome. The country people began to look with a 

 superstitious awe at the red lowering aspect of the sun ; and, 

 indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person 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 sprang 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 

 occurred to my mind ; and it is indeed particularly appli- 

 cable, 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." 



