INSECTS.
My banks they are furnished with bees,
Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
A Pastoral Ballad, Pt. II. W. SHENSTONE.
Here their delicious task the fervent bees
In swarming millions tend: around, athwart,
Through the soft air, the busy nations fly,
Cling to the bud, and with inserted tube,
Suck its pure essence, its ethereal soul;
And oft, with bolder wing, they soaring dare
The purple heath, or where the wild thyme grows,
And yellow load them with the luscious spoil.
The Seasons: Spring. J. THOMSON.
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
Poems. E. DICKINSON.
O'er folded blooms
On swirls of musk,
The beetle booms adown the glooms
And bumps along the dusk.
The Beetle. J.W. RILEY.
I'd be a butterfly, born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet.
I'd be a Butterfly. T.H. BAYLY.
Rose suddenly a swarm of butterflies,
On wings of white and gold and azure fire;
And one said: "These are flowers that seek the skies,
Loosed by the spell of their supreme desire."
Butterflies. C.G.D. ROBERTS.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Poetry: a Rhapsody. J. SWIFT.
I saw a flie within a beade
Of amber cleanly buried.
On a Fly buried in Amber. R. HERRICK.
Oh! that the memories which survive us here
Were half so lovely as these wings of thine!
Pure relics of a blameless life, that shine
Now thou art gone.
On Finding a Fly Crushed in a Book. C.T. TURNER.
When evening closes Nature's eye,
The glow-worm lights her little spark
To captivate her favorite fly
And tempt the rover through the dark.
The Glow-worm. J. MONTGOMERY.
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late;
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate.
The Mower to the Glow-worm. A. MARVEL.
Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree
over the well.
Leaves of Grass, Pt. XXXVIII. W. WHITMAN.
What gained we, little moth? Thy ashes,
Thy one brief parting pang may show:
And withering thoughts for soul that dashes,
From deep to deep, are but a death more slow.
Tragedy of the Night-Moth. T. CARLYLE.
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
Essay on Man, Epistle I. A. POPE.
Much like a subtle spider, which doth sit
In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide:
If aught do touch the utmost thread of it,
She feels it instantly on every side.
Immortality of the Soul: Feeling. SIR J. DAVIES.