How varied the scenes from which these teeming multitudes have come! What diversities, arising from birth, residence, and occupation, mark their separate histories! and, when viewed in the light of the sacred Scriptures, what solemn thoughts arise in reference to them all! Some have come from regions where the false prophet deludes the minds of millions with fatalism and sensual hopes; others from the wide-spread countries where Popery corrupts the truth of revelation, burdens the simplicity of the Gospel with Pharisaic rites, and hides the doctrines of the Cross behind the crucifix. Some from the dark plains of heathenism, with its “lords many and gods many,” worshipped under hideous forms, where the glory of the incorruptible God has been changed into “an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things;” others from various parts of our own favoured land, where the Bible is known, and its truths professedly honoured. But how few, it may be feared, of this vast multitude, have yielded their hearts to the influence of the Gospel! how few have realized their real condition as sinners, their solemn responsibility as accountable beings, and their need of the atoning blood of Christ! Immersed in the world, and striving to make the most of their brief sojourn here, must it not be suspected that they are living for temporal purposes alone, and that very many are “without hope, and without God in the world”? How painful is such a thought, when viewed in connection with the rapidity with which the generations of men are passing away from the face of the earth! Eleven years since, and a similar gathering, buoyant with hope and energy, assembled in the Palace of Glass, and wandered amid the treasures then collected; but what numbers of the busy throng have now passed into the more impressive realities of eternity! some to inhabit the “house of many mansions;” others into scenes where unavailing remorse is the bitter fruit of opportunities neglected and privileges slighted! The shadow of death seems indeed to mingle with the bright colours of splendour which adorn the present Exhibition. We miss the familiar countenances of some who took prominent parts in the gorgeous ceremonial of 1851. Our beloved Queen, whose presence shed a light and a lustre over the joyous throng, is absent, for death has entered her palace, and bereaved her of her Consort, so justly dear. She, in widowed solitude, mourns his decease; and none who visit this stately building can fail to miss the lamented Prince, whose comprehensive intellect first adopted the idea, and defined the principles which regulated the arrangement of the former and the present Exhibition—whose cultivated taste was pervaded by genuine piety, and whose loss will not soon be forgotten by a grateful and a mourning nation. He has been called to a nobler, a happier, a mightier assembly than that of which he was the guiding spirit here.