The sad widow is, for a long time after her bereavement, a sighing pattern of inconsolable grief. The atmosphere of her home is rainy with tears, and when abroad she is cloudy. Yet as time wears on, it is evident that the forty days and forty nights of affliction’s great deluge must go by, and at length the sorrowful widow will look for the appearance of the sun of cheerfulness, and trust that with it will come a rain beau. The gradual assumption of cheerfulness begins to make itself visible in her costume. Half mourning assumes the place of sombre weeds. On her face smiles occasionally chase away the lingering vestiges of regret. The spring of calmness has come, and hyacinthine blossoms of hope struggle up from the sodden desolation of wintry bleakness. Little by little the sad widow becomes resigned to her great loss, and gradually she learns to think that it may be repaired by a new matrimonial gain. Yet she is slow in assuming the garniture of happiness. She may occasionally be coaxed out into the world, and even tempted to attend a party or ball; but she does not forget that she is a widow. She is in the world, but yet not of it. She demeans herself as becomes the lone relict of the late Mr. Sad, and does not like the gayety of Mrs. Lively or the composure of Mrs. Sentiment.
If the persevering Mr. Nosey should approach the trio of widows in the hope of obtaining a partner for the next set, Mrs. Lively may suddenly put on an affectation of grave coyness, Mrs. Sentiment may be gracefully leaning her cheek against her fan whilst thinking of her dear lamented Charles Augustus, but Mrs. Sad will show surprise that the forward Mr. Nosey should dare to presume that they would dance when there are so many “young chits” who have not partners for the dance. But Mrs. L. has no care for these things, and in a very short time she is treading a measure to lively music as if she had never known a single sorrow.
There are so many peculiarities about widowhood, that it would require volumes to treat properly upon the subject. Mathematics might be called in to cipher out the problem of the elder Weller, as to how many times more fascinating is a widow than a maiden—but figures would not satisfy us. We would be sure to continue the subject by the further query—What is a widow like? And the result of all the cogitations might be summed up into the grand deduction—that widows are like gunpowder, always sure to go off when fired by a match.
ASTRONOMY.
ERA OF NEWTON, HALLEY, AND HERSCHELL.
There is no great operation of which we are cognizant, by which Nature at a single bound perfects her marvelous productions. It is only by a combination of instruments operating generally through a series of years. The ultimate result is reached by a progressive advance, to which a number of artificers contribute. The cedar, on whose boughs the snow rests and the fowls nestle, is the work of centuries; and the soil that laps its roots, the air that stirs its branches, the light that plays upon its crest, and the rain that drops upon its foliage, minister to the final development of the original cone. In like manner the social and political changes that have improved the tone of society, elevated the condition of nations, and endowed them with an enduring liberty, have not been accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, or by individual intelligence and will. Popular history may embalm the name of some distinguished patriot or philanthropist, as having been the agent is rescuing a country from the yoke of arbitrary power, and it may record a crisis of revolution confined within the limits of a year or a day; but a comprehensive view of such occurrences will embrace a time of preparation, and crown with honor a variety of laborers, though to one may be due the glory of the sun, and to another the glory of the stars. The signature of the edict that dethroned the heathenism of the ancient civilized world occupied the imperial hand a moment’s space, but the work of apostles, martyrs, and confessors, with the toils and sufferings of ages, are prominent in the picture. So the great demonstrations and achievements of science have transpired by slow degrees, and yield a distinction to be divided among a fellowship of kindred spirits, rather than assigned exclusively to a solitary example of mental prowess. If Keppler discovered the general laws of the universe, the basis of the discovery was laid by Tycho; and the marvelous Napier contributed essentially to the issue obtained, by the invention of the logarithms, an admirable artifice, as it has been justly called, which, by reducing to a few days the labor of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and saves him the errors and disgust connected with long calculations. If Newton developed the cause of those laws, he started to his grand result from a point expressly prepared by Keppler, and left the solution of the problem imperfect, for Laplace to finish. It is obviously in wise accordance with the happiness of mankind, that no nation possesses a monopoly of talent and fame, that many of the most remarkable efforts of human genius owe a debt of obligation to the accomplishments of genius at another era, and in a different clime. The fact proclaims the affinity of the species, between whom the mighty deep may roll, or the mountain rampart rise. It evinces, too, their mutual dependence, and will be hailed as a motive by the considerate mind, to the maintenance of universal amity.
To Hevelius, one of the merchant princes of Dantzic, an example of the close alliance of commerce with the fine arts and science which runs through the page of history, we owe the first accurate delineation of the lunar surface, the discovery of a libration in longitude; by his observation of the comet of 1664, he further corroborated the view previously taken, that such bodies are not sublunary, and approximated to the nature of their orbits. His contemporary Huygens, after effecting various improvements in the telescope, discovered one of the satellites of Saturn, that which is now termed the fourth, and obtained an insight into the singular structure of the planet, an inexplicable appearance to all preceding observers. An anagram, in the year 1656, announced to the world the following sentence by a transposition of letters, annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohærenta, ad eclipticam, inclinatio—the planet is surrounded with a ring, thin, plane, nowhere adhering, and inclined to the ecliptic. He justly observes, in a letter to his brother: “If any one shall gravely tell me that I have spent my time idly in a vain and fruitless inquiry, after what I can never become sure of; the answer is, that at this rate, he would put down all natural philosophy, as far as it concerns itself in searching into the nature of things. In such noble and sublime studies as these, it is a glory to arrive at probability, and the search itself rewards the pains. But besides the nobleness and pleasure of the studies, may we not be so bold as to say, they are no small help to the advancement of wisdom and morality?” The discovery of the great nebula in Orion was accidentally made by Huygens in the year 1656. Cassini, nurtured in France, soon afterward added four more satellites to the system of Saturn, those now called the first, second, third, and fifth, and he detected the black list, or dark, elliptical line bisecting the surface of the ring, and dividing it into two. Astronomy is under immense obligations to a measure adopted by the courts of France and England at nearly the same period, for the patronage of scientific associations, and the founding of national observatories. The Royal Society of London was incorporated by charter in the year 1662, and numbered among its early members Boyle, Hooke, Wallis, Ward, Newton, and Flamstead. The Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, was founded in the year 1666, and enrolled among its first members Auzout, Picard, Roberval, and Richer. Upon the invitation of Louis XIV. Huygens left Holland to become a royal academician, but being a Protestant, the revocation of the edict of Nantes ultimately compelled him to return to his native soil. The edict did not affect Cassini, a Catholic foreigner similarly invited; and to him, with his son and grandson, the French academy owes much of its early distinction. Besides his before named discoveries, he determined the periods of rotation of the principal planets, and observed the elliptical form of Jupiter’s disc, owing to compression at the poles.
Roëmer, the inventor of the transit instrument with which he made observations from the window of his house, rendered no unimportant service by showing that the instruments need not be fixed on high towers: he also discovered, in the year 1675, the interesting and hitherto unsuspected fact, of the progressive transmission of light through space, and the appreciable velocity with which it travels. This was attained by a series of careful observations of the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites. It was found, by comparing the times of immersion of the satellites in the planet’s shadow and emersion from it, with the times calculated from the laws of their movements, that there was an acceleration or retardation of the phenomena by a few minutes, plainly dependent upon the variations of the earth’s distance from Jupiter; for