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 superstitious 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, frequency 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 phaenomena.
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