Conflagrant

I would have cast me into molten glass To cool me, when I enter'd; so intense Rag'd the conflagrant mass.

Have you beheld the flashes from conflagrant dwellings, burnishing with angry beams the high vault of heaven? Ah! and did you descry the dear form of infant woe, and catch, with listening ear, the last bitter groan which escaped the angry billows of the ocean of flames?

I proceed to draw near to the metropolis, as I do not remember being struck with anything else, except with the country north of Birmingham, which might in one place be designated, the region of the ten thousand furnaces; which has a forlorn look of desolation and wretchedness in day light, but at night must no doubt assume an aspect of great conflagrant magnificence.

After adverting to the various opinions of former writers upon the subject, he calls attention to the “great lightnings and torrents of rain always attendant upon volcanic eruptions;” and expresses his conviction that this “ continuous blazing of the lightning, and whirling of the fire over and around stony mountains, distant from the conflagrant regions, having their summits uncovered by earth, must ignite the stone; and by the simultaneous dashing down of water the fury of the fire being prodigiously increased, there would be a melting of the stone, which would run like water over the surrounding plains.”

Leaped at a bound, aud smote him: hissed at once./The grisly monster’s heads enormous, scorched/In one conflagrant blaze.

And whirlpools churn the currents when the surges,/ Spent with their rage, would settle to a calm,/ And the conflagrant blast tempestuous urges/ The lambent tide with bluster to alarm/The spirits free from momentary harm:/ None can in anodyne lethean rest,/ None in forgetfulness can taste the balm/ Of sleep's nepenthe, by the rollers pressed,/ That lash them with their out-stretched arms and foaming crest.

Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of the universe — the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of the scene which he inhabits ; and you would not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it Is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour door.