Apocalypse then

摘要

"So long in a country not subject to fogs, we have been cover'd with one of the thickest I remember. We never see the sun but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a mile's distance, he sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion." When English poet William Cowper penned these words to his friend John Newton on 29 June 1783, an unwholesome haze had been hanging over England for more than a week, inducing peculiar atmospheric effects. "Somefearto go to bed, expecting an Earthquake," he wrote. "Some declare that he [the sun] neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of Judgement is at hand." By September, it looked as if theirfears might be justified. On 7 September, Cowper wrote to the rector of Stock in Essex: "Such multitudes are indisposed by fevers in this country, that farmers have with difficulty gathered in their harvest, the labourers having been almost every day carried out of the field incapable of work and many die."