Gradually the light grew more and more intense, and from irregular bursts it settled into an almost steady sheet of splendour. This sheet, however, was far from uniform, and may best be described as “a flood of mingling and variously-tinted streaks.” The exhibition, at first tame and quiet, developed by degrees into startling brilliancy. The broad dome of night seemed all ablaze. Lurid fires, fiercer than those which reddened the heavens from burning Troy, flashed angrily across the zenith. The stars waned before the marvellous outburst, and seemed to recede further and further from the Earth; “as when the chariot of the sun, driven by Phaeton, and carried from its beaten track by the ungovernable steeds, rushed madly through the skies, parching the world and withering the constellations. The gentle Andromeda flies trembling from the flame; Perseus, with his flashing sword and Gorgon shield, retreats in fear; the Pole-Star is chased from the night; and the Great Bear, faithful sentinel of the North, quits his guardian watch, following the feeble trail.” The colour of the light was chiefly red, but this was not permanent, and every hue mingled in the wonderful display. Blue and yellow streamers shot athwart the lurid fire; and, sometimes starting side by side from the wide expanse of the illumined arc, they melted into each other, and flung a weird glare of green over the landscape. [Illustration: THE AURORA BOREALIS.] Again this green overcame the red; blue and yellow blended with each other in their swift flight; violet-tinted arrows flashed through a broad glow of orange, and countless tongues of white flame, formed of these uniting streams, rushed aloft and clasped the skies. The effect of the many-coloured lustre upon the surrounding objects was singularly wonderful. The weird forms of innumerable icebergs, singly and in clusters, loomed above the sea, and around their summits hovered the strange gleam, like the fires of Vesuvius over the villas and temples of Pompeii. All along the white surface of the frozen sea, upon the mountain-peaks and the lofty cliffs, the light glowed and dimmed and glowed again, as if the air were filled with graveyard meteors, flitting wildly above some vast illimitable city of the dead. The scene was noiseless, yet the senses were deceived, for sounds not of earth or sea seemed to follow the swift coruscations, and to fall upon the ear like “The tread Of phantoms dread, With banner, and spear, and flame.” Though the details, so to speak, are not always the same, the general character of the aurora changes very slightly, and, from a comparison of numerous accounts, the gradation of the phenomenon would seem to be as follows:--