sunset and sunrising, which we have witnessed and alluded to so frequently, in this, our Drama of Nature.

We commenced our survey at sunset; we are consequently so near to the edge of the curtain of darkness that we observe all nature to more advantage under the brilliant lights and shadows of evening, than under the steady glare of day. But it is when we have rolled further into the curtain of night, and the dazzling light of our own sun is more completely enshrouded, that the feebler light reflected from the planets, and the direct light of innumerable other suns, the fixed stars of the firmament, become visible to mortals. And it was from behind this little curtain that the astrologers and astronomers of an hundred ages made those gradual discoveries, which have at length partially revealed to us the stupendous glories of illimitable space.

Before entering upon the astronomical relations of our little planet to the universe, we will once more, for a moment, ask your attention to the phenomena of light, as illustrated at the earth.

One complete hemisphere of the rolling orb receives the radiant sunlight; the other hemisphere, on the side away from the sun, is always in shade. On the one side it is rolling into, and on the opposite side rolling out of its own. shadow. On both sides, therefore, at the points of sunset and sunrise, as the sun's disc approaches the apparent horizon, receding or emerging, the light falls nearly parallel with the earth's surface, and illumines a broad tract of translucent atmosphere fleckered with the clouds of the hour, whence it is reflected in innumerable tints to the eyes of millions of mortals.

The well known law of the incidence and reflection of light at similar angles, is beautifully illustrated in the phenomena of the sunset skies. The sunset light falling on the various surfaces of earth, ocean and clouds, is reflected

at very various and constantly changing angles, for the earth's rotation is pauseless. The slanting, nearly horizontal, sunbeams falling of a tranquil evening on such a mirror as the Mediterranean, where Claude's pencil has so beautifully delineated the evening landscape, are reflected upward at the angle of incidence, and reaching strata of clouds of various density and elevation, are again deflected in various tints back upon the terrestrial observer. In proportion as the reflection is brilliant, this glow upon earth's or ocean's surface may be again repeatedly reflected, as often as the stone skips upon the water; and thus it is, probably, that those lingering, magnificently glorious twilights characterize the Mediterranean peninsulas, the shores of the American lakes, and the islands of ocean.

Those irradiant, divergent pencils of the sun's light, which occur before sunrise and after sunset, sometimes, when they are variously divided by broken rifts of clouds below the horizon, produce those beautifully striated reflections which are called the "aurora."

The atmospheric illumination, till the sun is eighteen. degrees below the horizon, is thus prolonged and deflected in a thousand different pencils from the halcyon seas of the tropics the icebergs of the arctic-the glacier summits of the Alps, the Himalaya and the Andes-the expanse of the billowy ocean, of the great lakes of the New Worldthe lesser lakes of Albion, the "Lacus Averni” of classic Italy, and the bright hills and shadowy valleys of earth's sunset landscapes.

The delightful, radiant, and sunny landscapes of Claude, the solemnity of Titian, the sublimity of Rembrandt, the rich, deep coloring of Rubens and Veronese, the grandeur of Michael Angelo, the grace of Raphael, the matchlesss sculpture of Phidias, of Praxiteles and of Canova, are admired and venerated only in proportion to their fidelity to nature.

A gentleman, late of our city, has done honor to himself, by a most curious and interesting collection of the natural objects of China, and of the paintings, costumes, arts and manufactures of that peculiar nation of three hundred and fifty millions of people, who occupy the opposite or antipode side of our globular landscape. The design is a good one, and might be extended to other nations. We might have an Hindoo, a Russian, a Prussian, an Egyptian, a French, an English, an African, and an American museum. We might construct them on an immense scale, and collect, at great expense, menageries of their respective animals grouped in gardens furnished with their accustomed plants, and artificially assimilated to the temperature of their native climates. We might even far surpass, in the variety and extent of our groupings, the noble Garden of Plants, at Paris, and all existing collections-yet this would be but a laborious and ineffectual effort to imitate nature, we should still have but caged eagles, and tamed monkeys. Let us embrace all co-existing realities, the present and the past, the living and the dead, as landscape scenes. We shall find all existing things already grouped in the magnificent museum of universal nature.

History is nothing but a picture; life is a picture; poems are pictures; Campbell's Pleasures of Hope is a picture of the Future: Rogers' Pleasures of Memory is a picture of the Past; the coexistent reality of nature, we are endeavoring to illustrate, is but a picture of the Present ; actual life is but a living picture, a tableau vivant.

To the omnipresent eye of the Omniscient, (let us speak with reverence,) the convex landscape of our planet, "this little theatre of human passions and human anxieties," is a continuous drama of a thousand millions of actors. "All the world's a stage."

Phidias and Raphael, Hogarth and Vernet, Euripides and Shakspeare, are but copyists of nature.

Roget, one of the ablest of living physiologists, remarks that "the perceptions supplied by our sense of sight being at once the quickest, the most extensive and the most varied, are the fittest vehicles for the introduction of other ideas. Visual impressions are those which in infancy furnish the principal means of developing and improving the powers of the understanding; it is to this class of perceptions that the philosopher resorts for the most apt and perspicuous illustrations of his reasonings; and it is also from the same inexhaustible fountain that the poet draws his most pleasing, as well as his sublimest imagery."

If this is true,-if it is pictures which convey to our early infancy the most vivid ideas, if the language of our after years is in fact but pictures, words calling up the mental image of their respective objects-if memory treasures up for future occasions its magic pictures, the receded scenes of life's real drama; if the tragedian on the histrionic arena presents to our senses pictures condensing life's successive realities into the passing hour, if, in short, every thing not actually before our eyes is undeniably a mental picture, all human knowledge or human wisdom, even when it assumes the highest attribute of which it is capable, the evidence of cause and effect which the Creator has immutably impressed upon terrestrial objects, is found comparing pictures of the present, or searching amid the successive pictures of the past, and thus deducing whatever of foresight can be claimed for its maturest conclusions. Even the mathematician has his pictures-in his delineations of mere form and proportion, he is compelled to resort. to them. The book of nature is sometimes used in a limited sense, as contrasted with revelation, but the drama of coexistent nature, and the changes which time works in it, is the great library of human wisdom, arranged for human instruction by the benignant Author of the scene and the

actors. Memory is but a sort of portfolio of pictures, which each individual carries about him.

It is in this portfolio, that we treasure the aptest lessons of our dawning intellect, and the vivid vicissitudes of our after years, and in life's latest moments the dying peasant and the peer, the favorite of ambition and its victim, the soldier expiring amid the din of battle, the sailor foundering amid the midnight tempest, delights his last flickering consciousness with the green hills and mother tones of his early childhood. A man is said to be of powerful memory, who has an accurate and well arranged mental daguerreotype port-folio of all he has seen and known.

As the first preparation for a drama is a good and easily shifted series of stage scenes, giving appropriate perspective to the historical passages to be represented, and these being perfected, offer a suitable arena, and add incalculably to the triumphs of histrionic genius-as the attention of the reflective spectator alternately dwells on the passing pageants and sentiments illustrated, and on the magic creations of the pencilled landscapes, so we having around us, in our real drama, all the variety and brilliancy, extent and grandeur of scenery, corresponding to the entire globular landscape of our planet,—having at our instant bidding all that is sublime and beautiful in what now exists on earth, and all that was glorious and worthy of remembrance in past time, must carefully adapt our scenery to the numberless pageants in the actual picture of nature, and summon our real actors from their mouldering repose, from the "communion of the immortals," from the resting place of heroes, to their true position in the history of the past, surrounded with all the freshness of natural scenery, with all the brilliant beauty of the changeful seasons, and all the glorious illusions, the sober realities, and instructive tragedies of history.

The disconnectedness, the rapid shifting of our scenes