forms and exquisite faces of the women, and the splendid strength and godlike beauty of the men.  A brief glance was sufficient to show me that the moving spring of all the civilization of this radiant planet was the love of Nature and Art united.  There were no wars—­for there were no different nations.  All the inhabitants were like one vast family; they worked for one another, and vied with each other in paying homage to those of the loftiest genius among them.  They had one supreme Monarch to whom they all rendered glad obedience; and he was a Poet, ready to sacrifice his throne with joy as soon as his people should discover a greater than he.  For they all loved not the artist but the Art; and selfishness was a vice unknown.  Here, none loved or were wedded save those who had spiritual sympathies, and here, too, no creature existed who did not believe in and worship the Creator.  The same state of things existed in Jupiter, the planet we next visited, where everything was performed by electricity.  Here persons living hundreds of miles apart could yet converse together with perfect ease through an electric medium; ships ploughed the seas by electricity; printing, an art of which the dwellers on Earth are so proud, was accomplished by electricity—­in fact, everything in the way of science, art, and invention known to us was also known in Jupiter, only to greater perfection, because tempered and strengthened by an electric force which never failed.  From Jupiter, Azul guided me to many other fair and splendid worlds—­yet none of them were Paradise; all had some slight drawback—­some physical or spiritual ailment, as it were, which had to be combated with and conquered.  All the inhabitants of each star longed for something they had not—­something better, greater, and higher—­and therefore all had discontent.  They could not realize their best desires in the state of existence they then were, therefore they all suffered disappointment.  They were all compelled to work in some way or another; they were all doomed to die.  Yet, unlike the dwellers on Earth, they did not, because their lives were more or less constrained and painful, complain of or deny the goodness of God—­on the contrary, they believed in a future state which should be as perfect as their present one was imperfect; and the chief aim and object of all their labours was to become worthy of attaining that final grand result—­Eternal Happiness and Peace.

“Readest thou the lesson in these glowing spheres, teeming with life and learning?” murmured Azul to me, as we soared swiftly on together.  “Know that not one smallest world in all the myriad systems circling before thee, holds a single human creature who doubts his Maker.  Not one! except thine own doomed star!  Behold it yonder—­sparkling feebly, like a faint flame amid sunshine—­how poor a speck it is—­how like a scarcely visible point in all the brilliancy of the ever-revolving wheel of Life!  Yet there dwell the dwarfs of