omena, or the debates among scientific men to which they had
given rise, and can therefore trust the impression made on my senses.

I have since then witnessed repeated appearances of these beautiful
meteoric lights, but have never again detected any sound accompanying
their motion. The finest aurora I ever saw was at Lenox, Massachusetts;
a splendid rose-colored pavilion appeared to be spread all over the sky,
through which, in several parts, the shining of the stars was distinctly
visible, while at the zenith the luminous drapery seemed gathered into
folds, the color of which deepened almost to crimson. It was wonderfully
beautiful. At Lenox, too, one night during the season of the appearance
of the great comet of 1858, the splendid flaming plume hovered over one
side of the sky, while all round the other horizon streams of white fire
appeared to rise from altars of white light. It was awfully glorious,
and beyond all description beautiful. The sky of that part of the United
States, particularly in the late autumn and winter, was more frequently
visited by magnificent meteors than any other with which I have been
acquainted.

The extraordinary purity, dryness, and elasticity of the atmosphere in
that region was, I suppose, one cause of these heavenly shows; the clear
transparency of the sky by day often giving one the feeling that one was
looking straight into heaven without any intermediate window of
atmospheric air, while at night (especially in winter) the world of
stars, larger, brighter, more numerous than they ever seemed to me
elsewhere, and yet apparently infinitely higher and farther off, were
set in a depth of dark whose blackness appeared transparent rather than
opaque.

Midnight after midnight I have stood, when the thermometer was twenty
and more degrees below freezing, looking over the silent, snow-smothered
hills round the small mountain village of Lenox, fast asleep in their
embrace, and from thence to the solemn sky rising above them like a huge
iron vault hung with thousands of glittering steel weapons, from which,
every now and then, a shining scimitar fell flashing earthward; it was a
cruel looking sky, in its relentless radiance.

My solitary walks round Edinburgh have left two especial recollections
in my mind; the one pleasant, the other very sad. I will speak of the
latter first; it was like a leaf out of the middle of a tragedy, of
which I never knew either the beginning or the end.