OF 8ELB0RNE, 
311 
prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part 
of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extra- 
ordinary appearance, unlike any thing 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 blank 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 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 super- 
stitious awe, at the red, louring 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 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, fre- 
quently occurred to my mind ; and it is indeed particularly 
applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes to a super- 
stitious 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." 
over the leaves below them, which he previously cleaned from honeydew. 
The result, as he anticipated, was, that the paper was soon covered with 
honeydew, while the leaves below it were fi-ee. — Ei>. 
