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Forty-eight months have vibrated their moments on the engagements and extensions of the Opalians. The divine art of printing has conveyed through numerous and constant agencies the heraldry of Asylumian intellect, and in the varied developments of society, our paper hath been insinuated by the gentleness of humanity, and reciprocated in a fourfold state the harbingers of progression in kindness by exchanges, whose opening leaves hath borne refreshment from the wines on the lees of humanity, well refined by the studied graces of purity, sense, discretion and knowledge, to the great comfort of this retirement, hallowed by the superintendence of wisdom and virtue.

In the diffusion of thought by the arts, its curiosity and character are enhanced by the manner in which it is communicated; and the respectful interchange of sympathy, and of emotions incident to nature that assimilate and affiliate the multiform interests and conditions of the human kind are so promoted by interchanges as to excite a brotherly regard for the correspondences, and a desire to advance their intelligences anew, when apprehended as the instrumentality of reasonable reliances.

If equals be added to equals the products are equal, saith the reasoner of intellects, as he leads the way over, the roughness of the mind's path to the delightful walks of truth and duty; and in accordance with the fact admitted and demonstrated by experience, the eye of wonder, of trust, of gratitude, admiration and love is turned toward the accomplishments of the Opalians and their friends with a constancy, a spirit of self-reliant and appreciating strength, encouraging to the weary or doubting, whose immaturity in intellectual corruscations tendeth to distrust and inaptitude.

Has the standard of the intellect been raised? -- has the discrimination between the barriers been distinctly promoted? -- has humility, the eldest child of good sense -- has heaven-born charity, love and the humanities been promoted in the noble use of reason, by minds once beclouded, distrained by anguish, and restrained by "science and religion"? -- has the high-born spirit of philanthropy shed its pure glow of healthfulness around the pages of Asylumia? Then it hath doubly blessed. It hath blessed him who gave and him who received, and crowned with immortal honor the devotion to humanity and its beneficences.

Bowing in no cringing servility either to our patrons or exchanges we carry the bosoms of self-respect and of respectful gratefulness to those who have shared in the comprehensions of the ever varying phases of life's scenes -- in its tempests, earthquakes, melancholies and joys -- and who have beheld a beautiful, brilliant rainbow of promise assuring that philosophy, as the handmaid of the Supreme, hath betokened a good day for the future unto those who have calmly, constantly, intelligently and zealously borne the toil and heat of life's pursuit.

"As thy day is so shall thy strength be," hath scriptured the confidence of distrustful hearts unto a hope that chaseth despair into cheerfulness, and is aroused to exertion and exercise in the never failing sources Providence supplies by the means appointed.

Entering upon, or rather continuing the sphere of Opalian duty, we trust where we have never been deceived, and confide in judgment that has not swayed in vain. Wars and sorrows, transitions and general and special conditions have loomed upon the sight; and not unwittingly for happiness, independence, the rights of man, mutual forbearance and self-knowledge, hath each borne testimony to the value and utility of intercommunications, and engendered a disposition that proposes to "persevering industry" a continuance of its performances, and to humane and generous and noble patronizers of the unsteady step of imperfect reason, an extended promotion of the means whereby it will be strengthened unto the fortitude, consideration, and intelligent appreciation of enlightened reason, in its bright-orbed, healthful path of duty.