Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/276

 from a wound. The prospects of our army were dark in the extreme, and I was continually agitated with fears for my sole earthly stay. To dissipate the melancholy impressions which thronged my soul, I ascended to the top of the house to take a view of that glorious firmament, which had so often led my thoughts from the woes of earth to the tranquillity of heaven. But the thunder of a terrible cannonade drew my attention to the surrounding scene. The whole peninsula seemed to tremble beneath the engines of war. Bombs, from the batteries of both parties, were continually crossing each others path. Like blazing meteors their luminous trains traversed each other, with awful sublimity. Sometimes I heard that hissing sound, when in their fall they excavate the earth, and rend in atoms whatever opposes them. Once I saw the severed, mangled limbs of several British soldiers thrown into the air, by their explosion. I fancied that I heard a groan of agony in the voice that I loved, and listened till sensation almost forsook me. Suddenly, a flame sprang forth from the bosom of the river. It was a column of ineffable brightness. The waters seemed to feed it, and every moment it rose higher, and extended wider, as if uncertain whether first to enfold the earth, or the heavens. Then two smaller furnaces burst forth near it, breathing intense fires in spiral forms, beautiful and dreadful. I gazed, till the waters glowed in one dazzling expanse, and I knew not but the Almighty in anger at the crimes of man, was kindling around him an ocean of flame; as He once pour-