after nightfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow on the hill-side, in which many of his flock had died; the rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting at the time on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him, for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity, when suddenly what seemed the figure of a man in heated metal--the figure of a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace--sprang up out of the darkness; and after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few seconds--in which, however, it traversed the greater part of the valley--as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts, during unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller, and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been exaggerated by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime and the briefness of the survey; but the apparition had filled his whole mind, as one of strange and frightful portent from the spiritual world. And often since that night has it returned to us in recollection, as a vision in singular keeping with the wild valley which it traversed, and the credulous melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness,-- 'A meteor of the night of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld Musing at midnight upon prophecies.'