Page 249 - Third Book of Reading Lessons

248 THIRD BOOK OF
LESSON XV.
THE F E-FLY.
THERE is an insect, that, when evening comes,
Small though be be, scarcely distinguishable,
Like evening clad in soberest livery,
Unsheatbs bis wings, and through the woods and
glades
Scatters a marvellous splendour. On be wheels, Blazing by ts, as om excess of joy,
Each gush of light a gush of ecstacy;
Nor unaccompanied; thousands that ing
A radiance all their own, not of the day, Thousands as bright as he, om dusk till dawn, Soaring, descending.Oft have I met
This shining race, when in the Tusculan groves My path no longer glimmer'd; oft amo Those trees, religious once and always green, That yet dream out their stories of Old Rome Over the lban lake; oft met and hail'd, Where the precipitate nio thunders down, And through the surging mist a poet's house (So some aver, and who would not believe?) Reveals itself.-Yet cannot I et
im,* who rejoiced me in those walks at eve, Iy earliest, pleasantest; who dwells unseen, And in our northern clime, when all is still, Nightly keeps watch, nightly in bush or brake is lonely lamp rekindling. Unlike theirs,
His, "if less dazzling, through the darkness knows
* The glow-worm.