| Description | The 'Excerpta' have not arrived, but she will read and return them as soon as they do. Colling thinks it an excellent idea to combine the chief beauties of Homer, sparing lady readers the wounds and bloodshed. Such realities still occur in many parts of the world, 'but in these enlightened times, tho', we are spared the harrowing details'. She would wish to have the entire work ['The Iliad'], however, and supposes she may procure it from her Darlington bookseller. If the 'Excerpta' are published she will get them together. She thanks Herschel for his interest in her narrow escape last October. She ascribed the exhibition of the evening before to the aurora borealis, the most beautiful of which she has seen was the grand luminous arch of 13 March 1858. She describes this and the 'grand plume or fan of Oct. 26th'. She believes that 'our place' has a peculiar attraction, with violent explosions last October. Colling gives her thanks to Mr. A [Alexander Stewart] Herschel for his transcript of the account of the auroral streamers seen from the south. She regrets she was the sole chronicler of the 'wonderous meteor'. She believes that the adjacent railway abstracted some of the electric fluid from her 'startling experience' of last October, noting that the station master sometimes sees it running along the rails for miles. The storm coincided with Lord Palmerston's funeral, and she could therefore compare it to London weather. A friend in Cleveland described darkness and discharges resembling artillery, and her brother thought it was heavy guns at Hartlepool. Colling describes local snowfall giving way to springlike weather. |