Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

lying it), but out of doors. If we cannot get it at home, we must seek it where the skies are blue and the breezes balmy, in Florida, or Southern California, or the Riviera, or sunny Italy. With time and means, it is now as easy to bathe in delicious and vivifying sunlight all the year round as it was for Naaman to leave his leprosy in the waters of Jordan. Thanks to the iron horse and magnificent steamships, we can follow the sun in his southward sweep, and compel him to a perennial summer. Thus Doctor Sunshine is always at call, and men the world over are becoming more and more disposed to put faith in his simple and natural remedies.

Rome's charming lyrist, Horace, tells us in his address to his book (Epist. xx. 20) that he was "solibus aptus,” fond of basking in the sun, and therefore loved to live at Tarentum, in the extreme south of Italy, in the winter. The sun was always the poet Gray's physician, and without its " sovran vital lamp," life, he said, would often have been intolerable to him. It is said of Le Sage, the author of "Gil Blas" (that charming story of which Macaulay said that he was never tired), that in his declining years, when his faculties were fast dying out, he became singularly dependent upon the sun: when that luminary appeared, and so long as it was climbing to the zenith, the lively author grew brighter and brighter; but from noon to sunset his powers underwent a gradual and perceptible obscuration. The biography of Brighton's brilliant preacher, Rev. F. W. Robertson, tells us that he basked and seemed to live more vividly in broad sunshine; it made all the difference between rapidity of thought, ease of arrangement, in preparing his sermons, and laborious failure, whether he wrote or not in a room facing the south.

Joseph Dennie, the delightful "Lay Preacher," -- of whom, as a native of this city, every Bostonian should be proud, declared that "the sun is the poet's, the invalid's, and the hypochondriac's friend." A slave to gloom in winter, he in April and May, under the potent influence of sunshine, gave care to the winds.

There are some persons who fully appreciate the benevolent agency of "old Sol" in winter, yet seem not to be aware that his vivifying beams are even more essential to health in summer. The exhalations from our bodies in warm weather are more copious than in cold, and the sun's rays are more needed, just as disinfectants are more needed in the former season than in the latter. The magical effects of sunlight upon human health and spirits are felt by thousands who hardly think of the cause. The rays of heat quicken the vital powers, the chemical rays exert their mysterious and potent influence, and the illuminating rays, independently of the others, communicate motion. To shut the light from our homes is to banish the most efficient of all agents in destroying what is detrimental to health and life. The noxious vapors, which the sunlight would remove, are ab

free admission of air and sorbed by carpets, wall paper, and upholstery, and generate disease. But why multiply proofs? Who has not noticed the contrast of the pallid faces, flaccid muscles, and nerveless movements of those persons who live in dark and consequently damp rooms, with the rosy looks and bounding energy of those who pass their days in the open air? The owl loves the twilight and the night; the eagle delights in the sunshine. What a miserable mope is the one; how strong-winged and exultant is the other! More persons die, it is said, on the north than on the south side

of hospitals, more persons on the shady side of the street than on the sunny one. Typhoid and kindred diseases have sometimes raged on the former side, while the latter has been exempt.

Who can wonder that the Persians once worshipped the sun? Why is Italy, with its shocking sanitation, so healthful? Because it is flooded with sunlight. Were it as sunless as England, it would be as unfit for human habitation as a pest-house. What a trumpet-tongued testimony is this to the poison-destroying, health-giving power of "old Sol "? It is now well known that the germs of those deadly diseases, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhoid, are utterly destroyed by vivid sunlight. Who can doubt that one of the prime benefits which invalids derive from a winter sojourn at Alpine or tropical resorts is due to the profuse sunshine enjoyed in them?

Old Women.

COLERIDGE is reported as saying that there were three classes into which all the women past seventy, that ever he knew, were to be divided : 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. It must have been to the first-named class that a later writer refers, when he says, that with the exception of a young one, there is nothing in the world so charming as an old woman. We agree with him, only, we would omit the exception, - provided she is a genuine old woman, without affectation ; one who has grown old gracefully, and who does not try to hide the sere and yellow leaf" by aping the dress, airs, and manners of the spring-time of life. Montaigne has said, alas! too truly, that old age is apt to impress as many wrinkles on the mind as on the body; and there are few men or women advanced to that stage of life, "qui ne

[ocr errors]

sent pas l'aigre et le moisi." Yet such a gray-haired woman as we have named may be a charmer, even though as old as the " Old Countess of Desmond," who, according to one tradition, lived to the age of one hundred and ten years, and, according to another, to one hundred and sixtytwo, and might have lived a Score or two more, so great was her genius for longevity, had she not fallen from a cherry-tree, as thus chronicled by a merry bard:

[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

As that Countess of Desmond, of whom I've been told
That she lived to much more than a hundred and ten,
And was killed by a fall from a cherry-tree then!
What a frisky old girl!"

[ocr errors]

Is it not an interesting and noteworthy circumstance, that most of the ancient heroes, as well as most modern philosophers and poets, have manifested a predilection for the society of old women? The ancient heroes, as was the custom of their day, showed their veneration to their nurses; the modern philosopher and poet, to an aged mother, sister, or friend, in whose wrinkled countenance they have beheld the reflection of eternity. Molière's the melancholy Molière's old woman will be forever associated with his name; and so will Cowper's Mrs. Unwin, as well as the mother on seeing whose picture he wrote his most touching verse. Pope gloried in rocking the cradle of age for a parent who appears to have struck the Horeb-like rock of even his selfish soul, till the tenderness gushed forth. Johnson, infirm and poor, had a companion still more infirm and poor, and blind withal, in old Mrs. Williams; Northcote had his sister; and Calvin, the rigid theologian, was always gentle and yielding to his old mother. Even De Maistre, the stern Ultramontanist, who

championed the Inquisition, and maintained that war and the gallows are the two poles on which society revolves, worshipped his aged mother, his sublime mother, as he called her," an angel," he said, "to whom God had but lent a body;" and, to descend to later times, when did Wordsworth's genius ever pour more liquid music into the sonnet (of which, after Milton, he was the greatest master), than in these lines "to a lady in her seventieth year"?

"Such age, how beautiful! O lady bright,

Whose mortal lineaments seem all refined
By favoring nature and a saintly mind
To something purer and more exquisite

Than flesh and blood; whene'er thou meet'st my sight,
When I behold thy blanched, unwithered cheek,
Thy temples fringed with locks of gleaming white,
And head that droops because the soul is meek, —
Thee with the welcome snowdrop I compare,
That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb
From desolation toward the genial prime;

Or with the Moon, conquering earth's misty air,
And filling more and more with crystal light

As pensive Evening deepens into Night."

Evil chastises

THAT eminently thoughtful and suggestive Itself. writer, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, closes in his "Journal" some remarks on the purification of society from its corruptions, which resulted from the descent of that "scourge of God," Genghis Khan, and his yellow, flat-nosed Mongols, upon Europe, with the following striking reflections, which appear to us singularly applicable to the recent anti-Italian outbreak of popular fury at New Orleans: "The Quakers will not see that there is a law of tempests in history as in Nature. . . . Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the air. Nos

« AnteriorContinuar »