NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 237 



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 23rd to July 2Oth inclusive, during which period the wind 

 varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the 

 air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, 

 and shed a rust-colored ferruginous light on the ground, and 

 floors of rooms ; but was particularly lurid and blood-colored 

 at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense 

 that butcher's meat could hardly be eaten on 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 a 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 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 vtiihfear of change 

 Perplexes monarchs." . . . 



LETTER LXVI 



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 in two, go in part to one of those 

 quarters, and in part to the other ; as was truly the case in 



