nd the West were answering each other with
alternate flashes of forked lightning that seemed to split the
black clouds with cracks of blinding blue, awful in their blasting
silence--followed by great, billowy, shattering rolls of thunder, as
loud as if the sky had been a huge kettledrum, on which the clubs of
giant drummers were beating a terrible onset; while at sudden intervals,
down came the big-dropped rain, pattering to the earth as if beaten
out of the clouds by the blows of the thunder. But Willie was not
frightened, though the lightning blinded and the thunder deafened
him--not frightened any more than the tiniest flower in the garden
below, which, if she could have thought about it, would have thought it
all being done only that she might feel cooler and stronger, and be able
to hold up her head better.

And once he saw a glorious dance of the aurora borealis--in all the
colours of a faint rainbow. The frosty snow sparkled underneath, and the
cold stars of winter sparkled above, and between the snow and the stars,
shimmered and shifted, vanished and came again, a serried host of
spears. Willie had been reading the "Paradise Lost," and the part which
pleased him, boy-like, the most, was the wars of the angels in the sixth
book. Hence it came that the aurora looked to him like the crowding
of innumerable spears--in the hands of angels, themselves
invisible--clashed together and shaken asunder, however, as in the
convolutions of a mazy dance of victory, rather than brandished and
hurtled as in the tumult of the battle.

Another vision that would greatly delight him was a far more common one:
the moon wading through clouds blown slowly across the sky--especially
if by an upper wind, unfelt below. Now she would be sinking helpless in
a black faint--growing more and more dim, until at last she disappeared
from the night--was blotted from the face of nature, leaving only a dim
memorial light behind her; now her soul would come into her again,
and she was there once more--doubtful indeed: but with a slow, solemn
revival, her light would grow and grow, until the last fringe of the
great cloud swung away from off her face, and she dawned out stately
and glorious, to float for a space in queenly triumph across a lake of
clearest blue. And Willie was philosopher enough to say to himself, that
all this fainting and reviving, all this defeat and conquest, were but
appearances; that the moon was her own bright self all the t