As yet we have no signs or tokens of this impending catastrophe, and are entirely in the dark about the process that is insidiously conducting us to it; and hence we ask, in solemn accents, WHAT BECOMES OF THE PINS? Where do they go to? How do they get there? What are the attractive and repulsive forces to which they are subject after they drop from us? What are the laws that govern their wanderings? Do they dissolve and volatilize, and come back again into the air, so that we are breathing pins without knowing it? Do they melt into the earth, and go to the roots of vegetables, so that every day of our lives we are unconsciously dining on them? The inquiry baffles all scholarship; and we are forced to put up with the obscure satisfaction which Hamlet applies to the world of apparitions, that there are more pins in unknown places and unsuspected shapes upon the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. LAMARTINE ON THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTIONARY MEN. I know--I sigh when I think of it--that hitherto the French people have been the least religious of all the nations of Europe. Is it because the idea of God--which arises from all the evidences of Nature, and from the depths of reflection, being the profoundest and weightiest idea of which human intelligence is capable--and the French mind being the most rapid, but the most superficial, the lightest, the most unreflective of all European races--this mind has not the force and severity necessary to carry far and long the greatest conception of the human understanding? Is it because our governments have always taken upon themselves to think for us, to believe for us, and to pray for us? Is it because we are and have been a military people, a soldier-nation, led by kings, heroes, ambitious men, from battlefield to battlefield, making conquests, and never keeping them, ravaging, dazzling, charming, and corrupting Europe; and bringing home the manners, vices, bravery, lightness, and impiety of the camp to the fireside of the people? I know not, but certain it is that the nation has an immense progress to make in serious thought if she wishes to remain free. If we look at the characters, compared as regards religious sentiment, of the great nations of Europe, America, even Asia, the advantage is not for us. The great men of other countries live and die on the scene of history, looking up to heaven; our great men appear to live and die, forgetting completely the only idea for which it is worth living and dying--they live and die looking at the spectator, or, at most, at posterity. Open the history of America, the history of England, and the history of France; read the great lives, the great deaths, the great martyrdoms, the great words at the hour when the ruling thought of life reveals itself in the last words of the dying--and compare.