When Shakespeare’s characters—reporting the sway of earth shaking like a thing unfirm, a tempest dropping fire, a lioness whelping in the streets, the bird of night hooting even at noon-day—take those prodigies to be portentous things unto the climate that they point upon, one’s teacher explains that the author is expressing, or exploiting, for his dramatic purpose, the superstitions of his Elizabethan public. No doubt so, but of course history does furnish us with things portentous; if we read them rightly, of the climate to come.
Burnham
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