throstle.
As you lie and listen, in the golden tenor of the hive-bee's hum seems
diffused the wide whisper of continuous gladness; and giving the
innermost note of summer and of noon, the booming bass of the humble-bee
blazons abroad all poetry and beauty and sumptuous delight.

"Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone,
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days and solid banks of flowers,
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wilderness found,
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure."

COUNTESS LAURA.

It was a dreary day in Padua.
The Countess Laura, for a single year
Fernando's wife, upon her bridal bed,
Like an uprooted lily on the snow,
The withered outcast of a festival,
Lay dead. She died of some uncertain ill,
That struck her almost on her wedding-day,
And clung to her, and dragged her slowly down,
Thinning her cheeks and pinching her full lips,
Till, in her chance, it seemed that with a year
Full half a century was overpast.
In vain had Paracelsus taxed his art,
And feigned a knowledge of her malady;
In vain had all the doctors, far and near,
Gathered around the mystery of her bed,
Draining her veins, her husband's treasury,
And physic's jargon, in a fruitless quest
For causes equal to the dread result.
The Countess only smiled, when they were gone,
Hugged her fair body with her little hands,
And turned upon her pillows wearily,
As if she fain would sleep, no common sleep,
But the long, breathless slumber of the grave.
She hinted nothing. Feeble as she was,
The rack could not have wrung her secret out
The Bishop, when he shrived her, coming forth,
Cried, in a voice of heavenly ecstasy,
"O blessed soul! with nothing to confess,
Save virtues and good deeds, which she mistakes--
So humble is she--for our human sins!"
Praying for death, she tossed upon her bed,
Day after day,--as might a shipwrecked bark
That rocks upon one billow, and can make
No onward motion towards her port of hope.
At length, one morn, when those around her said,
"Surely the Countess mends, so fresh a light
Beams from her eyes and beautifies her face,"--
One morn in spring, when every flower of earth
Was opening to the sun, and breathing up
Its votive incense, her impatie