Can it be maintained that Solon and Lycurgus would have alike given their fame in trust to immortality, if the genial influences of the land of their nativity had not been the same “at Rome as it was at Attica”?
Who will venture to assert that a similar fate would have followed the siege of Troy in a land of snows, or that Marathon would have been a northern Moscow?
Science, too, has felt the force of the benefit of its more northern home. With a temperature unshocked by extremes, the highest mental industry yields more, or rather different, fruit than the richest intellectual soil. The wheat and the corn of the necessaries to progress, are gathered only where the wine and the oil of luxury do not grow.
That Tyre and Sidon were marts for the cosmopolite, and now are but the refuge for the wanderer, while Boston, New York, New Orleans were the seaboards of the savage, and are now the emporiums of a hemisphere, is as true as that the causes are to be found in some degree dependent upon the influences of climate.
That Rome was the mother of nations, the terror of thrones, and the great entrance into eternity, and now is the dismantled wreck of her illustrious past—while the hunting-grounds of the “Six Nations” are transformed into a mighty empire, is but the melancholy picture of the past, gorgeous in its dilapidation, under the luxurious warmth of an Italian sky, while the other is the picture of the present, more magnificent and vigorous, tinted by the rays of a western sun.
Climate was not alone in producing these changes, yet its influence was potent.
The Religion of Nazareth took its metaphors from the land of Aristotle, its enthusiasm from the nations on the “seacoast,” its energy from the Northmen, but its divinity from God!
The songs of labor are heard loudest and sweetest where the valley and forest yield an annual tribute over the grave of all that is beautiful, born of the spring; while the songs of the sentiments take their melodies from the land of soft sunlight, scented with perennial perfumes.
In considering the Future let us look at the Past, and among the most remarkable of physical causes which have marked their existence on the history of nations and of men, climate will be found to have exercised by no means an inconsiderable influence.