THE WIDOW OF NAIN.
THE WIDOW OF NAIN.
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BY JOSEPH R. CHANDLER.
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[SEE ENGRAVING.]
How little can we of this latitude, or rather of this country, for latitude seems not to rule in all cases with regard to temperature; on one side of a continent, that parallel which gives agreeable winters and dry, healthful summers, is marked on the other side with cold, snowy winters and most unhealthful summers; what the variant circumstances are which produce this difference it is not easy to tell; the difference does exist, and ingenious theories have been constructed to suit those results; we say then again, how little can we of this latitude, or this country, judge of the enjoyments which others at a distance from us, but with the same shadows, have in the dry coolness of their evenings, or lassitude to which they are subject by the peculiar warmth which prevails during most of their summer days. The habits and customs among us are soon made conformable to the circumstances of our climate; though it must be confessed that people will always pertinaciously insist on a warm day on the first of May, and a stinging cold one on the 25th of December, while actual experience has shown that the thin floral garb adopted for the first has often led to consumption, and the winter furs and the great Yule-log that have distinguished the latter, have been considered rather seasonable than pleasant. So much for a poetical conformity, but in the every-day business of life things are better disposed of; people do not think in this country of sitting under their own vine till mid-summer, and then they look out for spiders; and as to their fig-trees, nobody gets under them unless it be the house-cat for a summer siesta. While eastward of the shores of the Mediterranean, people stretch themselves out upon the house-top for a comfortable night’s sleep, and spend a warm summer’s day beneath the cording shadow of the fig or the olive, and make life itself a blessing, not the means of enjoyment, but enjoyment itself; life and its accidents, the gratification of simple appetites—eating, drinking, and sleeping. Leaving to others the profitless toils that accumulate heaps of gold, only a portion of which can ever be used, and that portion will buy little more than what may be had and enjoyed without it. In this country we retreat away from an oppressive heat or a stinging cold, and make the absence of either an excuse for our merriment. In that other land to which we have referred, positive enjoyment is had in the uses of the evening air, and the contemplation of the heavenly hosts. Stars and planets twinkling in the clear blue ether above, not larger than seen from this continent, but far, far more intensely brilliant in the atmosphere, which allows of little refraction, and whose purity makes an upward gaze like the contemplation of some sanctified enclosure.