A leaf from nature is never out of place, and having an ulterior object in view, we resume our woodland sketches, though a little after date. Trees have many a moral as well as economical lesson.

This is the month when the thistle is in blossom, and its fragrance breathes by the road-side. The sunflower also turns its golden circlet of leaves, and its black ripening seeds to the great luminary, and a few autumnal flowers, besides the flaunting faded dahlias, are beginning to struggle for possession against the summer weeds. The mower's work is almost ended for the season, and the reaper's is begun, so that the meadows and pasture grounds, refreshed with rains and coolness, display a tender green, like the spring growth of grass, uncropped and unshaven. But the forests are still in all their glory. A deeper, darker green, verging in grand masses of foliage towards the brown and purple, with an indurated glossy lustre, is all that indicates the time of changing hues, and the fall of the leaf, and the departure of the glories of summer as near.

I am now in a region of great woodland richness, variety and beauty. The vast sweeping undulations, and fair sloping terraces, and distant long waving ridges of country, rising at the horizon into mountain ranges, are covered with deep forests interspersed with cleared and richly cultivated farms, so fair, so smooth, so green with lawns and fields of grain and meadows, that nothing can be more beautiful. The deep masses of the woods are composed mostly of the pine and maple, beautifully intermingled, the maple being far predominant. It grows to an immense hight and size, so that the forests here are truly magnificent. In the coolness and freshness of the dewy morning, how sweet to pass at early dawn into the depth of these grand old woods, or after seeing sunrise in the open glades, or on the upland lawn, to enter the forests when the trees are casting their earliest shadows, and the sun is throwing his slant beams upon the clusters of the topmost foliage. These majestic, tall, old trees, the growth of centuries, how solemnly they rise towards heaven, upholding and outspreading in such pendant arches, a waving roof of thick, fretted, interlacing foliage, over avenues of dim cathedral aisles.

And when the wind breathes softly, or sweeps with surging gales over the leafy branches, how the whole forest whispers with the music, or roars like the thunder of the far off sea!

These mighty trees are the growth of centuries, and what depth of soil from centuries of decay! Here and there a vast tree lies along, the bark of which looks so sound that you would not dream of its being a tree in form only, and in reality a mass of moist vegetable loam; but you set your foot to walk upon it, and you plunge into it as you might into a huge rotten squash or melon. Sometimes the decaying trees are piled one upon another, moss-covered inches deep, the giant corses of the vegetable world, laid there by kindly nature in their open sepul-cher, death amidst life, death nourishing life, new trees springing fresh and majestic from the skeletons of the old, and dropping the annual autumnal shroud of withered leaves over their former compeers in the forest. The heart of such a deep unbroken wilderness is truly a sublime, impressive, solemn spectacle. How many lessons it teaches, if only this human heart is in that suggestive, moral mood, in which, in such a spot as this, meditation may think down hours to moments. Nay, Cowper might have said ages to days; for you realise here something of the truth, that one day is with the Lord as a day.

Here are these trees, hundreds of years in rising; what grand products of time and nature, and almost as long decaying, and the processes of life and death go on in such sublime unconsciousness and carelessness, of time, as if it were an eternity of vegetation.

What grand and thoughtful objects! Seventy feet in height, some of the clean straight trunks rise up before a branch or leaf is visible, and then they spread in the sky their airy festoons and fans of foliage. The tall maples in the evening sun, look like birds of paradise spreading their golden wings, for nothing can be richer, in its transmission of the golden yellow light of sunset, than the delicate green leaf, almost transparent, of the maple. A maple seen against the sunlight, while its leaves are in their summer tenderness of hue and texture, is one of the richest and most splendid objects in the whole domain of nature. It looks as though it might have been bathed in the sea of glass in heaven, or in the river of the water of life, or in a pool of liquid topaz, so that a breath of wind across it would bring down, showering, a rain of golden light.

The play of light upon the leaves is like the changeful moods of thought and feeling in a sensitive soul, like the flashings and fitful pauses, and lightnings up again of expression, in an intelligent and watchful countenance. One can never be weary with observing the quick and magical variety. The whole forest is mottled with spots of sunlight, that takes the color of the leaf it falls on. But the loveliness of the sight depends on whether you observe the light falling on the foliage before you, and reflected from it to your eye, while the sun is behind you, or whether you look at the light coming to you through the foliage, and at the foliage with the sun behind it. The latter is much more beautiful. Indeed, as it comes and goes in the forest, it seems like a visible pervading spirit, now revealed, now hiding and withdrawing. The branches, leaves, and green earth seem to breathe with it, as if its coming and going were the inspiring and exhaling motion of the vital being of nature in these woods.

As the clouds pass and the light pours in, the depths of the woods are opened by it, the perspective of the retreating lines of trees is visible, and the radiant, sparkling air between, and the finest network of the interlacing foliage. Here and there a far off trunk, on the whole length of which the sun streams direct through some glade opening, is seen gleaming through a vista of green, and the eye runs down cloistered and festooned avenues and arches, seemingly interminable. Then again, as the sun is suddenly shaded, all is confusedly drawn together, un-sphered of interspace. and comparatively dispiria line beyond or hither, then all becomes indistinct, obscure, glimmering, nor are any reaches of clear and radiant air visible between the intervals and openings of hill and valley, forest and winding dale. - Independent.

The Problem for a Republic - The great Industrial Exhibition at London, which has just closed, has elicited many good speeches and original thoughts on both sides of the water. Its one leading aspect has not, however, been seized by any one so significantly as by Mr. Winthrop - a statesman always most completely American, and always broad and comprehensive in his views - in his late speech at Faneuil Hall, before the Mechanic's Association. The following extract will awaken thought in the minds of all republicans:

But let me ask, sir, who of us is sorry that we are behind, far behind, the old word, in articles of mere taste and ornament? Who does not rejoice that we cannot vie with Europe and Asia, in arts that minister only to the lust of the eye and the pride of life? Who is in haste to see the day, when the tissues and tapestries, the jewels and porcelain of India or of France, shall be native to our own land! Who, on the contrary, does not desire that such a consummation may be postponed, until that double problem shall be solved, of which the history of mankind as yet affords no solution. - first, how these sumptuous and gorgeous decorations of the rich can be fabricated without the degredation and debasement of the poor; - and second, how the morality and puri-ty. which are the very vital air of republican liberty, can withstand the fascinations and blandishments of a corrupting and cankering luxury?

And this leads me to say, Mr. President, in a single concluding sentence, that there is at least one element wanting in that great exhibition, for the purposes of any just comparison between our own and other countries. We see there the products - but we do not see the producers. We see there the fabrics - but we do not see the hands which made them.

Sir, if it had been possible to exhibit, in any tangible shape, or by any personal representation, the real condition of the artisans and mechanics of the world; if the makers of every article could have been seen standing by their work, with their ordinary dress on their back, with their ordinary food at their side, and with all the advantages or disadvantages of their relative condition fully developed and displayed - their intelligence, their education, their wages, the amount of Individcarpet like thai described in one of the tales of the Arabian Nights. - if it could be set down safely in that much talked of "vacant space" in the American section of the Crystal Palace; and if your excellent President, now there, could be on the spot to meet you as you alight, and to say to the assembled throng of visitors: "Here are the American Mechanics - here are the men who build our ships, and our bouses, and our bridges, and our railroads - who make our iron ware, and tin ware, and brass ware, and who construct those wonderful machines and invent those curious implements to which you have given your prises - and here, too, are their wives and daughters - behold them, and compare them with your own" - would they not feel that it was something better than a vainglorious boast, for us to exclaim: "Man is the uoblier plant our realm supplies.

And souls are ripened in these northern skies'"