The tuneful king of Israel considered the praise of the Creator incomplete, until “the multitude of the Isles,” should swell that chorus. The islands are required to “keep silence,” when an eloquent prophet was about to declare a message from Jehovah. The apostle, to whom the dread future unveiled itself, “was in the island that is called Patmos,” when he saw in a vision the “the heavens wrapped together like a scroll, and the dead, small and great, stand before God.” Heathen mythology sang to her disciples of the “isles of the blessed.” Classic Greece fixed the birth-place of her deity of the seven-stringed lyre in wave-girdled Delphos, and bade her most beautiful goddess from the foam of the sea. Modern Poetry has not forgotten to invoke the island-spirits. Shakspeare lifts the magic wand of Prospero in a strange, wild isle, full of “Sweet sounds and airs that give delight, and hurt not.” He makes another less lofty character propose “to sow the kernels of a broken islet in the sea, that they may bring forth more islands.” The patriotism of Milton beheld in his own native clime, the chief favorite of Neptune: “this isle, The greatest and the best of all the main, He quarters to his blue-haired deities.” The Bard of the Seasons still further glorified it, as the “Island of bliss amid the subject seas.” It is as easy as it would be tautological to multiply suffrages in praise of insular regions. Still less necessary is it to bespeak popular favor for the island that gives this sketch a subject and a name. The Dutch settlers of Staten Island seem to have regarded it with an enthusiasm quite in contrast with their usual phlegmatic temperament. Scarcely a century after its occupation by them, the patient and true-hearted Huguenots came to solace the woes of their exile amid its sheltering shades. The armies of Great Britain held it in possession during the whole of our revolutionary contest; and even the indurating influences of war did not render them insensible to its surpassing loveliness. In later times, the States of New York and New Jersey have contended for its jurisdiction with the warmth of lovers, and the jealousy of rivals. The latter approaches with extended arms, as if to enfold it in an earnest embrace, its bright shores curving closely around the coveted treasure; but the Empire State, upon whose waters it reposes “as a star on the breast of the billow,” has bound the gem to her bosom forever.