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the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, if you can bear the fatigue of such a promenade, and look at the seven or eight miles of materials and manufactures before you. These are the appliances and achievements of Industry. One and all, they are connected with something within the man-within all menwithin yourself. The Three Great Kingdoms of Nature-animal, vegetable, and mineral, present their treasures to this industrial principle, inviting, suggesting, and almost demanding the putting forth of your inventive energies, to elicit and improve the vast wealth before you. Excepting the raw materials in this gigantic show-room, all has grown out of human industry. Everything is seminal and suggestive-profitable in an inferior sense for doctrine, for reproof, or for instruction. It is, in fact, Instruction made visible, History dramatized, Mental, and in some cases Moral, Philosophy embodied.

Look, first at the Animal Kingdom. There will be wool and hair, dressed and undressed, and in all stages of its manufacture into coarse and fine stuffs. Skins, tanned, tawed, and cured in every way, with all their multiform products, boots, shoes, gloves, the old aristocracy and the young gentility in the world of leather-the "quite new," and the newer; all the refinements in those arts connected directly, indirectly, or remotely with such wares. Then in the department of feathers, there will be princely plumes, flowers, fancy-work, and a thousand devices never before dreamt of, astonishing no less by their delicacy and beauty, than by their unprecedented originality. And there, too, our young ladies may see such triumphs of knitting and netting as will place all their last year's labors in mats and muffetees hors de combat. But what can be said of silks? From the crude cocoon to the most costly and splendid brocades, and damasks, and satins, there will be a continuous series of links-a woven history of the labors of the worm, from its sojourn in the mulberry groves of China, till like the less sightly spider, it finds itself in king's palaces.

The Vegetable world will yield its ample stores, too numerous even to touch upon. Cotton, from the plant itself, unfolding its rich, soft, silky floss, glossy as spun glass, and white as driven snow; to the finest of its manufactures-each a curious history in itself, and all provocative of honest emulation, and

friendly progress. All countries, too, will bring their downy treasures to this Fair of Nations; and we shall thus be introduced perhaps to fields of wealth hitherto unknown or unexplored. The best and cheapest mart will command the world; and who can tell, that soil tilled by the blood of slaves may not eventually prove less remunerative than that which recognizes no vested rights in the cow hide, the branding iron or the mush trough.* Flax and its useful products, from the coarsest to the finest, the cable to the cambric handkerchief, delicate as tissue, and its worked and embossed and embroidered varieties. But the subject is too vast for detail.

The Mineral kingdom is still richer-richer in a hard literal sense, as well as in its more figurative, but really more true one. Gold from California, gold from China, gold from Europe, gold even from our own island, and silver from many lands, in every variety of forms-in ore, flake, drop, and dust— from the mine, the mountain, the stream, and the sandy waste; gold in every shape of which it is susceptible; its transmutations illustrated by ample and ingenious apparatus-gold passing almost visibly from its first crude state, to its final touch, every phase in its history exemplified and made plain by carefully modelled machinery and significant diagrams.

But what is gold compared with our great staples of coal and iron. These will of course occupy a prominent place in the Great Exhibition. The seams as they lie in their natural bed, the lodes and veins as they intersect their primeval rocks will be first shown. Thus a new world underground will be laid open, with its shafts, levels, and cross-cuts-its air passages, its rolley-ways, and head-ways; and the melo-drama of a miner's life, be brought graphically before us. But time would utterly fail us to tell of the thousand and one wonders of this Great Exhibition. Let us, therefore, come to a closc with a few thoughts tending to profit.

We have glanced at a few only of those miracles which industry can accomplish. They are not the results merely of manual energy, but of deep, earnest, original thought-of mental, no less than physical power. Many of the operations involved in the display we have but feebly sketched, require

* See our Vol. for 1847, p. 379.

sedentary or solitary Much of the visible

shrewd head-work, and others by their character, either suggest or admit of it. and tangible in this. vast palace, was once intangible and immaterial, if we must not call it uncreated, and say, what in a certain sense we may say truly—that it was not. Thought has taken all these shapes-has wrought all these wonders, and is capable of more. The very fact of such an Exhibition supposes this. As iron sharpens iron, comparison and competition are to give a new and keen edge to Mind. "Onward! onward! onward!" is the text from which this crystal palace preaches.

And the analogy holds good with respect to moral progress. No one who has not seen the rich treasures of this Industrial Ark, can have any adequate idea of what they will be. Perhaps as wide and large a field lies open to us in the moral world. The mind that seems to know no limit in its range through things material, cannot surely be fettered in its spiritual aspirations. If straitened, it must be straitened in itself. The God who made it for His service, will aid it in its struggles for the Right-the True-the Good. Aim high-test your powers in the noblest and best direction. Whatever you have done in the past year, you may do more in the present. "Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do, do it WITH ALL THY MIGHT!"

MY EXHIBITION OF INDUSTRY, 1850.
(Found in a Young Lady's Work-box)

“THE Great Exhibition of Industry!"—Dear!
How I wish there was something of mine to appear!
I should like all the world to know what I could do
For the good of my age, and posterity too,
For I fear folks will judge me, as matters now run,
Less by what I can do, than by what I have done.

?

Let me see!-of the year that has just passed away,
And its varied employments-what—what can I say
-There's the long piece of Music, I half copied out
For "that creature" I met at the Titterly's rout-
There's my knitting, my netting, my crotchet; and then
-There's my crotchet, my netting, my knitting again;

My five blistered mats in pink lambswool-my purse—
My anti-macassars-my night-cap for nurse;
My very limp doll for that dear little soul,

Susan Hopwood-and-there!-I'm afraid that's the whole.

Oh no! there's those lines-those original lines,

I wrote in that album of dear Charlotte Hine's

About "sorrow," and "morrow," and "borrow," and "joy "Without any mixture of care or alloy;"

The swan I "stumped in" for that hateful Miss Coke,
Like a wreath of white steam on a back-ground of smoke ;
My letters-I'm sure I have written a dozen,

All crossed on four sides, to my aunts and my cousin ;
And drawings- -or rather one drawing-for still

I have left, in dim outline, the wheel of the mill.

Now, really, these seem very little to show,

Though, what more I have done I am puzzled to know;
But then I've not had many moments to spare,

With five hours for music, and one for

my hair.

In household affairs, I've been guilty, I feel,

Though I darned one old stocking, I think, in the heel-
Ah! no, there it lies-with the needle still in-

Well, I will make an effort, and once more begin,

Lest the year EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY should flee, Ere one useful act be recorded of me!

Q.

ALL OF GRACE.

Mr. M'Laren, and Mr. Gustart, were both ministers of the Tolbooth church, Edinburgh. When Mr. M'Laren was dying, Mr. G. paid him a visit, and put the question to him, "What are you doing, brother?"

His answer was, "I'll tell you what I am doing, brother; I am gathering together all my prayers, all my sermons, all my good deeds, all my bad deeds; and I am going to throw them all overboard, and swim to glory on the plank of free grace."

THE DIAL OF TIME.

INGENIOUS mechanics have contrived clocks which showed, not only the passing seconds, minutes, and hours; but also the days and months of the year; each indicated by some appropriate signal. There is perhaps a natural propensity in the human mind to mark distinct intervals of time, so that a public dial is deemed to be improved, when, in addition to the ordinary routine of striking quarters, and half-hours, certain periods are distinguished by chimes of different kinds. Some clocks thus notice every sixth or twelfth hour, others peel forth their solemn monitions only at midnight. In the centre of our great metropolis, there is a touching variety in the sounds that teach the listening ear from numerous musical clocks at that quiet season. Grave and gay strangely mingle in the tones, yet the grave predominate, and the rich strains of the Old Hundredth Psalm, or the Evening Hymn, seem most in harmony, with the feelings of the hour!

These audible voices of time recur periodically, with even added interest. The slowly booming notes which sound the knell of the old year, convey impressions of deep meaning to a thoughtful heart, so that one is scarcely ready for the merry peel of melody which generally ushers in the succeeding new year. A brief pause between the last day of a bye-gone era, and the first of another space, would be acceptable; yet it cannot be and when the century itself shall have reached its termination, it will be quickly followed by the new century; and so with the thousand years, or the thousand centuries; till the angel shall be commissioned to declare, that "there shall be time no longer ; "—there is no cessation; no intermission in the steady, onward progress.

The swiftness of time is proverbial: even the slang phrase of the flippant youth, "How goes the enemy?" originates in a conviction of the fleetness of his wings. Doubtless it is to many, an enemy, for its only record is of talents misused, hours wasted, mercies abused; a fearful catalogue, daily and yearly augmented! But why not render it a friend instead of a foe, and let each fanning of its plumes, as it speeds its course, drop a blessing on our path; leave a trace of wisdom on our minds;an added grace to our characters ?

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