The bannered host--the darkened skies-- The thunderings all about, Foreshadow but a Nation's birth, Answering a Nation's shout! RED, YELLOW, AND BLUE. Alas for the old fashions! Wonder, incredulity, curiosity, and a crowd of primitive sensations, the whooping host that greeted, like misformed brutes on Circean shores, the steamboat and the telegraph, are passing away on a Lethean tide, and our mysteries are departing from among us. The intelligence which so long gazed wistfully upon the barred door of nature, or picked unsuccessfully at the bolts, with skeleton theories, and vague speculations, had learned to try the 'open sesame' of science. The master key is turning, the shafts yield, and already a dim glory shines through. While the strides of a positive philosophy are crippled by enthusiastic rhapsodies about intuition and instinct, her footsteps are still indelible, and her progress is certain and accelerating. Reason is written on her brow; she appeals to the universal gift, and denies the authoritative dictations of fallible genius, as much as a moral equality disallows the divine right of kings. Speculators among stars, speculators among sounds and colors, are the skirmishers in front of an intellectual post, whose tread reverberates but little in their rear. Accoutred with a few empiric facts and inductive minds, they aspire to beautiful and stable theories, whence they may descend, by deductive steps, accurate even to mathematical absoluteness, to the very arcana of what has been the inexplicable. To them the true, the beautiful, must be facts, defined, realized, and vigorously analyzed. Visible embodiments of an incomprehensible grace must be disintegrated, and the thinnest essences escape not the analytical rack whereon they confess the causal entity of their composition. 'Broad-browed genius' may toss his locks in the studio redolent of art; his eye may light, and his nervous fingers print the grand creation on the canvas. The divine afflatus is in his nostrils; it is his spirit, and his picture is the reflex of his soul. But keen-eyed Science lays a shadowy hand upon the 'holy coloring,' and says: 'Truly, the harmony is beautiful; it has pleased a sympathetic instinct from the first. Yet, from the first, my laws have been upon it--inexorable laws, which answer to the mind as instinct echoes to the soul.'