"From moment to moment as the totality approaches, the cold and darkness advance apace; and there is something peculiarly and terribly convincing in the two different senses, so entirely coinciding in their indications of an unprecedented fact being in course of accomplishment. Suddenly, and apparently without any warning (so immensely greater were its effects than those of anything else which had occurred), the totality supervenes, and darkness _comes down_. Then came into view lurid lights and forms, as on the extinction of candles. This was the most striking point of the whole phenomenon, and made the Norse peasants about us flee with precipitation, and hide themselves for their lives. "Darkness reigned everywhere in heaven and earth, except where, along the north-eastern horizon, a narrow strip of unclouded sky presented a low burning tone of colour, and where some distant snow-covered mountains, beyond the range of the moon's shadow, reflected the faint mono-chromatic light of the partially eclipsed sun, and exhibited all the detail of their structure, all the light, and shade, and markings of their precipitous sides with an apparently supernatural distinctness. After a little time, the eyes seemed to get accustomed to the darkness, and the looming forms of objects close by could be discerned, all of them exhibiting a dull-green hue; seeming to have exhaled their natural colour, and to have taken this particular one, merely by force of the red colour in the north. "Life and animation seemed, indeed, to have now departed from everything around, and we could hardly but fear, against our reason, that if such a state of things was to last much longer, some dreadful calamity must happen to us all; while the lurid horizon, northward, appeared so like the gleams of departing light in some of the grandest paintings by Danby and Martin, that we could not but believe, in spite of the alleged extravagances of these artists, that Nature had opened up to the constant contemplation of their mind's-eye some of those magnificent revelations of power and glory which others can only get a glimpse of on occasions such as these." It can be easily imagined, that under such peculiar and awful circumstances, the careful observation of these effects must be somewhat difficult, [Page 32] and the only wonder is that the astronomical observations are conducted with any certainty at all.