But Willie was not frightened, though the lightning blinded and the thunder deafened him--not frightened any more than the tiniest flower in the garden below, which, if she could have thought about it, would have thought it all being done only that she might feel cooler and stronger, and be able to hold up her head better.
And once he saw a glorious dance of the aurora borealis--in all the colours of a faint rainbow.

The frosty snow sparkled underneath, and the cold stars of winter sparkled above, and between the snow and the stars, shimmered and shifted, vanished and came again, a serried host of spears.

Willie had been reading the "Paradise Lost," and the part which pleased him, boy-like, the most, was the wars of the angels in the sixth book.

Hence it came that the aurora looked to him like the crowding of innumerable spears--in the hands of angels, themselves invisible--clashed together and shaken asunder, however, as in the convolutions of a mazy dance of victory, rather than brandished and hurtled as in the tumult of the battle.
Another vision that would greatly delight him was a far more common one: the moon wading through clouds blown slowly across the sky--especially if by an upper wind, unfelt below.

Now she would be sinking helpless in a black faint--growing more and more dim, until at last she disappeared from the night--was blotted from the face of nature, leaving only a dim memorial light behind her; now her soul would come into her again, and she was there once more--doubtful indeed: but with a slow, solemn revival, her light would grow and grow, until the last fringe of the great cloud swung away from off her face, and she dawned out stately and glorious, to float for a space in queenly triumph across a lake of clearest blue.