and one who has seen
lightning only in the sombre sky of Britain can scarce imagine its
intense brilliancy in these more southern latitudes. With us it breaks
with a red fiery flicker; there it bursts upon you like the sun, and
pours a flood of noonday light over earth and sky. One evening, in
particular, I shall never forget, on which I saw this phenomenon in
circumstances highly favourable to its finest effect. I had walked out
from Geneva to pass a few hours with the Tronchin family, whose mansion
stands on the southern shores of the lake. It was evening; and the deep
rolling of the thunder gave us warning that a storm had come on. We
stepped out upon the lawn to enjoy the spectacle; for in the vicinity of
the Alps, whose summits attract the fluid, the lightning is seldom
dangerous to life. All was dark as midnight; not even the front of the
mansion could we see. In a moment the flash came; and then it was
day,--boundless, glorious day. All nature was set before us as if under
the light of a cloudless sun. The lawn, the blue lake, the distant
Alpine summits, the landscape around, with its pines, villas, and
vineyards, all leaped out of the womb of night, stood in vivid intense
splendour before the eye, and in a twinkling was again gone. This
amazing transition from midnight to noonday, and from noonday to
midnight, was repeated again and again. I was now to witness the
sublimities of a thunder-storm on the plain of Lombardy.

Right before us, on the far-off horizon, gleams of light began to shoot
along the sky. The play of the electric fluid was so rapid and
incessant, as to resemble rather the continuous flow of light from its
fountain, than the fitful flashes of lightning. At times these gleams
would mantle the sky with all the soft beauty of moonlight, and at
others they would dart angrily and luridly athwart the horizon. Soon the
storm assumed a grander form. A ball of fire would suddenly blaze forth,
in livid, fiery brilliancy; and, remaining motionless, as it were, for
an instant, would then shoot out lateral streams or rays, coloured
sometimes like the rainbow, and quivering and fluttering like the
outspread wings of eagles. One's imagination could almost conceive of it
as being a real bird, the ball answering to the body, while the flashes
flung out from it resembled the wings, which were of so vast a spread,
that they touched the Apennines on the one hand, and the Alps on the
other.

The storm took yet ano