That air, that lovely serenade of Donizetti’s, seems floating in the room. A sweet voice is singing it in my ear, in my heart. Ah, those old times! I think of the hour when first I heard that strain, and of the fair creature singing it—with the twilight shadows around us, and her lip, that might have tempted an Angel, curling, half-proudly, half-kindly, as “upon entreaty” she resumed the strain. I fall into deeper reverie as I recollect it all—those evenings of entrancement, those days of boyish pain and jealousy. And ever the melody comes floating in through my brain, yet without attracting my thoughts—a strain of sweetest sounds accompanying the dissolving views which are dreamily, perpetually, forming and changing, gathering and dispersing, before my mind’s eye, like the rose-clouds of sunset. Those shapes are too ethereal for the mind to grasp them. Is it a Juno-like form, beneath the skies and amid the flowers of Summer—with Zephyr playing among her golden curls, as she lifts from her neck a hair-chain to yield it to the suit of love! Or is it a zigzag path on a hill-side—a steed backing on a precipice—a lovely girl on the green bank, clinging to her preserver—sinking, swooning, quivering from that vision of sudden death! Who shall daguerreotype those airy shapes? We feel their presence rather than know their form, and the instant we try to see what we are seeing, they are gone! We are no bad risers in the morning, but we never saw the sun rise on Midsummerday but once. It is many years ago, yet we remember it as vividly as if it had been this morning. It was from the summit of the Calton Hill, the unfinished Acropolis, the still-born ruin of Modern Athens. The whole sky in the south and west, opposite to where the sun was about to appear, was suffused from the horizon to the zenith with a deep pink or rose hue; and in the midst, spanning the heavens, stood a magnificent Rainbow! A symbol of peace in a sea of blood! There lay the palatial edifices of the New Town, white and still in the hush of early morning, and high above them and around them rose that strange emblem of mercy amid judgment. Such an apparition might fitly have filled the skies of the Cities of the Plain on that woeful morn, the last the blessed sun ever rose upon them;—ere amid mutterings in the earth and thunders in the clouds, the volcano awoke from its sleep, and the red lava poured from its sources of fire—when clouds of stones and ashes, falling, falling, falling, gathered deeper and deeper above the Plain, and the descending lightnings set fire to the thousand founts of naphtha bubbling up from their subterranean reservoirs—when a whirlwind of flame shot up against the face of the sky, like the last blasphemy of a godless world; and with a hollow groaning, the sinking, convulsed earth hid the scene of pollution and wrath beneath the ever mournful-looking waters of the Dead Sea. The skies of night and morning are familiar to