says:

"Triste jaces lucis evitandumque bidental."

The ground, too, that had been smitten by a thunder-bolt was accounted
sacred, and afterwards enclosed; nor did any one even presume to walk on
it. Such spots were, therefore, consecrated to the gods, and could not
in future become the property of any one.

Among the many other items of folk-lore associated with thunder is a
curious one referred to in "Pericles" (iv. 3): "Thunder shall not so
awake the bed of eels." The notion formerly being that thunder had the
effect of rousing eels from their mud, and so rendered them more easy to
be taken in stormy weather. Marston alludes to this superstition in his
satires ("Scourge of Villainie," sat. vii.):

"They are nought but eeles, that never will appeare
Till that tempestuous winds or thunder teare
Their slimy beds."

The silence that often precedes a thunder-storm is thus graphically
described in "Hamlet" (ii. 2):

"'we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region.'"

_Earthquakes_, around which so many curious myths and superstitions have
clustered,[147] are scarcely noticed by Shakespeare. They are mentioned
among the ominous signs of that terrible night on which Duncan is so
treacherously slain ("Macbeth," ii. 3):

"the obscure bird
Clamour'd the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake."

[147] See Tylor's "Primitive Culture," vol. i. pp. 364-367.

And in "1 Henry IV." (iii. 1) Hotspur assigns as a reason for the
earthquakes the following theory:

"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down
Steeples, and moss-grown towers."

_Equinox._ The storms that prevail in spring at the vernal equinox are
aptly alluded to in "Macbeth" (i. 2):

"As whence the sun 'gins his reflection
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring, whence comfort seem'd to come,
Discomfort swells."

--the meaning being: the beginning of the reflection of the sun is the
epoch of his passing from the