for another! for I confess with shame and contrition,
that I never wait to enquire whether it thunders to the left or the
right, to be frightened most ingloriously. Isn't it a disgrace to
anyone with a pretension to poetry? Dr. Chambers, a part of whose
office it is, Papa says, 'to reconcile foolish women to their
follies,' used to take the side of my vanity, and discourse at length
on the passive obedience of some nervous systems to electrical
influences; but perhaps my faint-heartedness is besides traceable to a
half-reasonable terror of a great storm in Herefordshire, where great
storms most do congregate, (such storms!) round the Malvern Hills,
those mountains of England. We lived four miles from their roots,
through all my childhood and early youth, in a Turkish house my father
built himself, crowded with minarets and domes, and crowned with metal
spires and crescents, to the provocation (as people used to observe)
of every lightning of heaven. Once a storm of storms happened, and we
all thought the house was struck--and a tree was so really, within two
hundred yards of the windows while I looked out--the bark, rent from
the top to the bottom ... torn into long ribbons by the dreadful fiery
hands, and dashed out into the air, over the heads of other trees, or
left twisted in their branches--torn into shreds in a moment, as a
flower might be, by a child! Did you ever see a tree after it has been
struck by lightning? The whole trunk of that tree was bare and
peeled--and up that new whiteness of it, ran the finger-mark of the
lightning in a bright beautiful rose-colour (none of your roses
brighter or more beautiful!) the fever-sign of the certain
death--though the branches themselves were for the most part
untouched, and spread from the peeled trunk in their full summer
foliage; and birds singing in them three hours afterwards! And, in
that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were
killed on the Malvern Hills--each sealed to death in a moment with a
sign on the chest which a common seal would cover--only the sign on
them was not rose-coloured as on our tree, but black as charred wood.
So I get 'possessed' sometimes with the effects of these impressions,
and so does one, at least, of my sisters, in a lower degree--and
oh!--how amusing and instructive all this is to you! When my father
came into the room to-day and found me hiding my eyes from the
lightning, he was quite angry and called 'it disgracef