through the buildings, and the trees shook, as if with mortal fright and terror; the sorrowing clouds shed great drops of tears, as if mourning in comfortless grief over poor human frailty, while the soughing and the sighing of the sea was a fitting sympathium to their forlornness and despair.
Thicker rolled the dense black pall over the face of the vaulted heaven, hiding all its glories, and shrouding it in the very folds of gloom, whose density was only relieved when the broad glare of the lightnings rushed out upon the sky. The sheets of flame were of various colors—violet, green, white, red and purple. The three former appeared to issue from the earth's surface; the others, from the space above and immediately around us. There were occasionally lines of purely white fire, and these took the form of chains, every link of which carried ten thousand deaths along with it. These came singly; and sometimes two, separate lines of fire would leap out from the bosom of the clouds simultaneously, but from opposite quarters of the gloom—in which case they appeared to meet in anger, like as if two angry gods were warring with each other, and their junction was instantaneously followed by the most terrific bursts of thunder that ever fell on human hearing since the mighty worlds were made.
I shook with mortal terror; and this terror increased and intensified into positive, almost unendurable agony, as crash after crash of horrible roaring, rolling, bursting god-cannonry swept down the vast concave, drowning the clangor of the mad winds, which were rushing and rumbling through the spaces, striving desperately to rival and surpass the awful voice of the electric god himself. I felt that I was lost; and in that moment of
