258 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
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 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 vvhen the sun, new risen, 
* Looks through the horizontal, misty air. 
Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon, 
In dim ecHpse, disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs. " 
LEITER LXVI. To the Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON. 
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 quar- 
ters, 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 us and the sea, there are continual moun- 
tains, hill behind hill, such as Nare-hill, the Barnet, Butser-hill, 
and Ports-down, which somehow divert the storms, and give 
them a different direction. High promontories, and elevated 
grounds, have always been observed to attiact clouds and disarm 
them of their mischievous contents, which are discharged into 
the trees and summits as soon as they come in contact with 
those turbulent meteors ; while the humble vales escape, because 
they are so far beneath them. 
But, when I say I do not remember a thunder-storm from the 
south, I do not mean that we never have suffered from thunder- 
storms at all; for on June 5th, 1784, the thermometer in the 
morning being at 64, and at noon at 70, the barometer at 29 — 
six tenths one-half, and the wind north, I observed a blue mist, 
smelling strongly of sulphur, hanging along our sloping woods, 
and seeming to indicate that thunder was at hand. I was called 
in about two in the afternoon,' and so missed seeing the gather- 
