Now the moon is not only a beauty, but she is somebody—one of the higher classes. She moves in an elevated sphere; is of aristocratic, nay, of royal blood. We have said enough. Each fair republican reader is propitiated, and for the ears of their fat papas we will whisper, “She is enormously rich, ’tis said”—by the poets. These gentlemen, whose imaginations, after all, are not one half so lively as those of Wall-street brokers, will tell you that the moon is all silver; that her rays are silver, and that they silver every thing they rest upon. However, this last assertion must not be construed literally by people who cannot bear disappointment very well. If some such sanguine person should leave a bogus dollar in the moonlight over night, expecting by these means to make it good coin and legal tender, he would be chagrined in the morning, unless somebody had been cheated into stealing the base metal, to find it a bogus dollar still. A dead gold-fish, exposed of a warm summer night to the same influence, will be sadly “changed,” as the housewifes express it, to be sure; but the transmutation will not be from gold to silver. The ancestry and origin of the moon, though admitted to be highly respectable, are not so well known as some fastidious people might desire; and, as is usual where there is some mystery and uncertainty, there have been various and contradictory stories told by the divers persons who have undertaken to give us information on these points. Moses tells us very briefly and positively, that she is twin sister of the sun, and that her birth-day was the 3d of January, in the year 0001. Since that time, with the sun for a partner, she has been constantly dancing attendance on the earth, ruling the night, while her brother, like the Grand Vizier of Algiers, has regulated the affairs of the Day. Once only have the twain rested from their labors. At the request of Joshua, who got somewhat belated in a skirmish with the Five Kings, some years ago, the sun stood still over Gibeon, while his sister reclined in the valley of Ajalon and fanned herself. We cannot tell certainly whether the moon has ever been able to recover from this delay, and catch up to the place in which she would have been if the detention had not happened. But an ingenious and learned Hibernian philosopher has very plausibly suggested, that she is still behind her time, and that this is the reason why she does not rise earlier of dark nights, for the illumination of which she was so evidently intended. But the Mosaic account of the moon’s origin and early life is esteemed to be the more prosaic; and the poets, who have taken great pains to look into these matters, give greater credence to the Pagan historians.