Those forms at present despoiled of the thousands and tens of thousands of living flowers, which should cover and enliven them have, perhaps, in that stern nudity an additional attraction for the mind. I love to look upon the trees in winter, when their bared boughs tell us and show us what they really are. And thus it is with the Madrepores. In their present nudity, when from pictures they have become statues, it seems as though they were about to reveal to us the whole secret of the minute populations of which they are at once the creation and the monument. Many of them seem to write to us in strange characters, to speak to us in strange tones. Their interlacings evidently have a something to tell us, could we but understand them. But who shall be their interpreter; who shall give us the keynote to their harmony, mysterious harmony--but Harmony doubtless? How much less significant is the Bee architecture in its cold, severe, geometry! That is the produce of life, but here we look upon life itself. The stone was not simply the base and shelter of this people; it was itself a previous people, an anterior generation, which, gradually overtopped by the younger, assumed its present consistence. And all the movements of that first community are still strikingly visible, as details of another Herculaneum, or Pompeii. But here everything is accomplished without catastrophe, without violence, by orderly and natural progress; all testifies to serenity and peace. Every sculptor will here admire the forms of a marvellous art which has achieved such infinite variety of forms, improving upon all arts of ornamentation. But we have to reflect upon something far beyond mere form. The arborescent variety on which the activity of these laborious tribes has been so wonderfully employed, is the effort of a thought, of a captive liberty, seeking the guiding thread in the deep and mazy labyrinth, and timidly feeling its way upward towards the light, and gently and gracefully working out its emancipation from communist life. I have in my possession two of these little trees differing from each other, but of like species. No vegetable is comparable to them. One, purely white as the most immaculate alabaster, has an inexhaustible wealth of buds, and blossoms and flowers, on every one of its many spreading branches. The other, less white and less spreading, has also its whole world upon its branches. Exquisitely beautiful are they both; alike yet unlike, twins of innocence and fraternity. Oh who shall explain to us the mystery of the infant soul that created these faëry things! We feel that it must be at work, captive and yet free; captive in a captivity so beloved that though still tending upward towards freedom, it yet cares not fully to achieve it.