before sunrise, night after
night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up
toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the
fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct
view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear night, as she
does with us, but when she is brightest, actually shines through the
clouds with an illumining power.

Alternating with these glories of the starry firmament, the moon at the
full fills the lower air with a soft, yet bright light, in which you can
read without difficulty the smallest print. Under this milder
illumination, the overpowering luxuriance of the landscape loses its
oppressiveness, the hills assume more rounded forms, and from the
general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in
soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which
disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair
land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet
unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with
living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises of their Creator.
Daylight chases away this illusion, but brings back the reality of
Christian work, whose rugged but cheerful tasks replace the delicious
but ineffectual dreams of Paradise Lost, by the hope of contributing, in
some humble measure, toward restoring in a province of fallen earth the
lineaments of Paradise Regained.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: This was during the Crimean war.]

THE RESTORATION OF THE UNION.

God is on the side of our country. Let us reverently thank him that he
has favored the general march of our arms toward the sacred end of our
exertions--the defeat of the daring attempt against the unity of our
national power and the integrity of our free institutions. Not always in
human affairs has the cause of right and freedom prevailed. In the
gradual development of human society, as unfolded in the lapse of long
ages, the oppressor has generally triumphed, and history has full often
been compelled to record the failure of the noblest efforts, and the
downfall of the most righteous designs conceived for the benefit of man.
Such has been the experience of the race in those parts of the world
which have longest been the theatre of human enterprise and of
established government. But the American continent seems to present an
exception to this uniformity of sinis