The tender plant, and withers all its shades;
It lies uprooted from its genial bed:
A lovely ruin, now defaced and dead.
Passing now from inanimate nature to animate things, there are in the Bible a good many metaphors based thereon. Here, again, it is the prophet Isaiah who furnishes us with the largest number of instances. One of them is the bee that symbolizes an invading army, working all kinds of mischief. Thus we read in Isaiah (vii. 18):—“On that day will the Lord hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the river of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria, and they shall all come and rest in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon all thorn-bushes, and upon all the pastures.” A fine parallel occurs in Homer's Iliad (ii. 87), which runs as follows:—
As from some rocky cleft the shepherd sees
Clustering in heaps on heaps the driving bees,
Rolling and blackening, swarms succeeding swarms
With deeper murmur and more hoarse alarms;
Dusky they spread, a close embodied crowd,
And o'er the vale descends the living cloud: