Finished.

THERE is a beautiful significance in the fact that when Divinity would build a temple for Himself on earth, he commanded that it should rise without the sound of hammer, and so,

"Like some tall pine, the noiseless fabric grew."

The HAMMER is the emblem of man's creations. About his rarest works you will find it; hidden in a corner, resting on a column, lying behind a statue; it is some where. Heap about the pedestal whereon stands the "GREEK SLAVE" the chips and the chisels, the gravers and the hammers, and how is the magic of the marble diminished or destroyed! It is no longer a being waked from the sleep of creation, throwing off its Parian shroud, and only waiting the whisper of Omnipotence to breathe, but a stone, blasted, and pried, and tugged, and lifted from some body's quarry; perforated, and chipped, and hewn ; modelled in clay by a man in an apron, and wrought out "by the hardest" by macaroni-eating barbarians in short jackets and blue caps. The dead waking, the dumb eloquent, the silent thought shaping out and

indwelling the marble, all vanish, "like the baseless fabric of a vision," at the sight of a hammer. The Yankee sees into it,' and 'guesses' a lathe could be made to turn' the thing cut in half the time, and is sure as preaching' he was born to make it. He wonders if it couldn't be 'run' in a mould; if plas ter wouldn't do as well; whether the least' tich' of red paint wouldn't make her lips kinder' human, and a pink skirt more like a Christian? He can't see why' it should cost 'such a tarnal sight;' and where are the beauty and the poetry of the Greek SLAVE? Ask, "Where are the birds that sang an hundred years ago?" as well.

In the construction of this great Temple of the World, find, if you can, a moulding, a cornice, an architrave, with a rivet in it; any puttying of nails, or hiding of seams, or painting over of patches. Oh! no; every thing is finished, no matter where, no matter how you find it. All the blue masonry of Night was done without trowel or hammer. No quick clip of scissors scalloping the leaves of ten thousand flowers; no ring from the mighty anvil, whence scintillate, nightly, the sparks of starry time; no brushes, or pencils, or patterns, lying about rose-trees and woodbines; no staging" discovered round the

oak as it goes up; no mortising machines nor mallets beneath it, though the great arms securely fastened to the column, are swaying bravely aloft.

Who ever sat up late enough at night, or rose long enough before the sun in the morning, to find any thing unfinished? If a bud, 'twas done; if a blossom, perfect; a leaf or a leaflet, alike nonpareil. Bid the "Seven Wise Men of Greece" sit in solemn conclave over a budded rose, and what one of them would dream there was any thing more to be done, any thing more to be desired?

Who ever detected, any where, a leaflet half fashioned or a flower half painted? a brush's careless trail on some little thing that peeps out of the cleft of a rock, and dodges back again at a breath; some little thing of no consequence, that no body hardly ever, if ever, sees? Ah! no; as delicately finished, fashioned, and perfumed, as if it had bloomed in the conservatory of a queen, and been destined for the wreath that encircles her brow.

Every thing of Heaven's handiwork is finished, frot first to last; from the Plan of Salvation, 'finishe upon Calvary, to the violet 'finished,' that opens blue eye to the dew.

"Bugs" and Beauties.

For the last five minutes, a MILLER in a dusty suit of "silver gray" has been fluttering round the candle. Yesterday afternoon, his royal cousin, the BUTTERFLY, that some body, so Cowley-like, called “a winged flower," was fluttering round a sunbeam. no dusty miller was this, in sober gray, for when Nature painted it, she spared no tint of the richest and rarest that would render it beautiful-that would

·

But

show" in the sun. There's a fellow in dark brown now, creeping over the sheet as I write. It stopped at the word, Butterfly,' and crawled contemptuously over it. This Mr. Brown is never seen in the daytime, but looks well enough by lamplight, starlight, or moonlight. Any thing more would be useless, because unsight, unseen," as the boys say. Had it been other than a night-walker, it would have been spotted with gold, specked with vermilion, tricked out with indigo-blue legs, or rigged with transparencies. Nature is altogether an artist, and though with all the dyes of the rainbow at command, and to spare, exhibits a most remarkable and commendable economy

in her adornings. Show me a flower opening only at night, and I will almost always show you one that has taken the white veil or affects a demure gray. She is equally judicious in her varnishing: the upper surfaces of millions of leaves-how glossy and polished! Three coats of paint and six of varnish, by the palette of Reubens ! But the lower surfaces, just as nice, but neither so green nor so glossy; it would be of no use, and besides, they could not breathe freely through new paint.

Speaking of coloring: isn't it a little queer, or is it just as might be expected, that JOIN GALT should come all the way across the ocean, out of two thicknesses of London fog, to tell people "to the manor born" what color an American sky is, in the summer, toward sunset? Or that they should marvel to learn it is an apple-green-the reflection of those great emeralds of earth, the Prairies, and those miles on miles of forest billows, that roll up and up, and fling their green spray into heaven? Poetasters, poor fellows! how blank they'd look-wouldn't they? should a law be passed, forbidding their babble about azure, blue, and cerulean skies; and they compelled, if they spoke at all, to say, 'Oh! apple-green heavens !'

Nature is not half so pains-taking with very early