WHAT IS LIGHTNING? 579 



Of a summer's evening lie watched the soft radiance 

 glimmer fitfully from one pink vapor wreath to another, 

 or silently bathe the distant horizon again and again in 

 golden glow. He saw the cold fires of the Aurora waving 

 like fingers beckoning men to find them in the frozen 

 North-land. He saw the great, heavy clouds sweeping in 

 from the sea and forming their serried columns upon the 

 mountain-flanks. He saw them crowd into the gorges, 

 and break against the peaks, rolling back in scattered 

 fragments to form new cohorts to hurl themselves once 

 more upon the eternal rock. He saw the lightnings shiv- 

 ering and seething in their fleecy masses, or leaping out, 

 hissing and snake-like, to rend the stone battlements and 

 send the avalanches rattling down the precipices. He 

 heard the crash of the warring forces of earth and sky, the 

 fury and turmoil of the never-ending battle of the clouds 

 and the mountains, roaring and resounding from steep to 

 steep until its deep diapason died away amid a thousand 

 echoes and left the earth shuddering. 



The great poet of his race had already idealized the spirit 

 of the air that did these things. Franklin's invocation 

 lay not to the imprisoned imps in the bottles, but to 

 "Ariel and all his quality." 



All through the summer of 1749 he kept at work, reso- 

 lutely holding himself aloof from political allurements. 

 Kinnersley helped him. His procedure is methodic; his 

 trials and conclusions are noted without a shadow of emo- 

 tion or a sign that their author knew himself to be speedily 

 Hearing his goal. His question was not, What is electric- 

 ity? but, What is lightning? His object, a physical mode 

 of making nature herself answer; not a collection of anal- 

 ogies and resemblances from which a reply might, with 

 more or less certainty, be inferred. These, however, it 

 was necessary to gather in order to perceive what the cru- 

 cial experiment ought to be. Therefore, he seeks out 

 every feature in which the electrical effects produced by 

 his machines agree with the lightning, and sets them all 



