"Secret, radiant, profound ever, and never to be known, was she; many forms indicate, and none declare her. Like all such beings, she was feminine. All the secret powers are "mothers." There is but one paternal power. "She had heard my wish while I looked at the stars, and in the silence of fate prepared its fulfilment. 'Child of my most communicative hour,' said she, 'the full pause must not follow such a burst of melody. Obey the gradations of nature, nor seek to retire at once into her utmost purity of silence. The vehemence of thy desire at once promises and forbids its gratification. Thou wert the keystone of the arch, and bound together the circling year: thou canst not at once become the base of the arch, the centre of the circle. Take a step inward, forget a voice, lose a power; no longer a bounteous sovereign, become a vestal priestess, and bide thy time in the magnolia.' "Such is my history, friend of my earlier day. Others of my family, that you have met, were formerly the religious lily, the lonely dahlia, fearless decking the cold autumn, and answering the shortest visits of the sun with the brightest hues; the narcissus, so rapt in self-contemplation that it could not abide the usual changes of a life. Some of these have perfume, others not, according to the habit of their earlier state; for, as spirits change, they still bear some trace, a faint reminder, of their latest step upwards or inwards. I still speak with somewhat of my former exuberance and over-ready tenderness to the dwellers on this shore; but each star sees me purer, of deeper thought, and more capable of retirement into my own heart. Nor shall I again detain a wanderer, luring him from afar; nor shall I again subject myself to be questioned by an alien spirit, to tell the tale of my being in words that divide it from itself. Farewell, stranger! and believe that nothing strange can meet me more. I have atoned by confession; further penance needs not; and I feel the Infinite possess me more and more. Farewell! to meet again in prayer, in destiny, in harmony, in elemental power." The magnolia left me; I left not her, but must abide forever in the thought to which the clew was found in the margin of that lake of the South. CONSECRATION OF GRACE CHURCH. Whoever passes up Broadway finds his attention arrested by three fine structures--Trinity Church, that of the Messiah, and Grace Church. His impressions are, probably, at first, of a pleasant character. He looks upon these edifices as expressions, which, however inferior in grandeur to the poems in stone which adorn the older world, surely indicate that man cannot rest content with his short earthly span, but prizes relations to eternity. The house in which he pays deference to claims which death will not cancel seems to be no less important in his eyes than those in which the affairs which press nearest are attended to.