merce_ draws the picture as it was
seen nearly eighteen centuries later, the likeness to the prophetic
description being emphasized in every line:

"No philosopher or scholar has told or recorded an event like
that of yesterday morning. A prophet eighteen hundred years ago
foretold it exactly, if we will be at the trouble of
understanding stars falling to mean falling stars."--_New York
Journal of Commerce, Nov. 14, 1833._

In this connection was noted by the same writer the special
appropriateness of the prophet's figure of the fig tree casting the
green figs in a mighty wind:

"Here is the exactness of the prophet. The falling stars did
not come as if from _several_ trees shaken, but from _one_.
Those which appeared in the east fell toward the east: those
which appeared in the north fell toward the north; those which
appeared in the west fell toward the west; and those which
appeared in the south (for I went out of my residence into the
park) fell toward the south; and they fell not as ripe fruit
falls; far from it; but they _flew_, they were _cast_, like the
unripe fig, which at first refuses to leave the branch; and
when it does break its hold, flies swiftly, straight off,
descending; and in the multitude falling, some cross the track
of others, as they are thrown with more or less force."

Professor Olmsted's long and carefully elaborated account in the
_American Journal of Science_, gave a report from a correspondent in
Bowling Green, Mo., as follows:

"Though there was no moon, when we first observed them; their
brilliancy was so great that we could, at times, read
common-sized print without much difficulty, and the light which
they afforded was much whiter than that of the moon, in the
clearest and coldest night, when the ground is covered with
snow. The air itself, the face of the earth as far as we could
behold it, all the surrounding objects, and the very
countenances of men, wore the aspect and hue of death,
occasioned by the continued, pallid glare of these countless
meteors, which in all their grandeur flamed 'lawless through
the sky.'

"There was a grand and indescribable gloom on all around, an
awe-inspiring sublimity on all above; while--

"'The sanguine flood
Rolled a broad slaughter o'er the plains of heaven,
And nature's self d