In South America I was accustomed to see dragon-flies in rushing hordes and clouds, and in masses clinging like swarming bees to the trees; here we see them as single insects, but I once witnessed a beautiful effect produced by a large number of the common turquoise-blue dragon-fly gathered at one spot, and this was in Hampshire. I was walking, and after passing a night at a hamlet called Buckhorn Oak, in Alice Holt Forest, I went next morning, on a Sunday, to the nearest church at the small village of Rutledge. It was a very bright windy morning in June, and the oak woods had been stripped of their young foliage by myriads of caterpillars, so that the sunlight fell untempered through the seemingly dead trees on the bracken that covered the ground below. Now, at one spot over an area of about half an acre, the bracken was covered with the common turquoise-blue dragon-fly, clinging to the fronds, their heads to the wind, their long bodies all pointing the same way. They were nowhere close together, but very evenly distributed, about three to six inches apart, and the sight of the numberless slips of gem-like blue sprinkled over the billowy, vivid green fern was a rare and exceedingly lovely one.
After writing of the lovely haunters of the twilight, and that noblest one of all—
The great goblin moth who bears
Between his wings the ruined eyes of death,
and the angel butterfly, and the uncanny dragon-flies—the flying serpents in their splendour—it may seem a great descent to speak of such a thing as a glow-worm, that poor grub-like, wingless, dull-coloured crawler on the ground, as little attractive to the eye as the centipede, or earwig, or the wood-louse which it resembles. Nor is the glow-worm a southern species, since it is no more abundant in the warmest district of Hampshire than in many other parts of the country. Nevertheless, when treating of the Insect Notables of these parts, this species which we call a "worm" cannot be omitted, since it produces a loveliness surpassing that of all other kinds.
Here it may be remarked that all the most beautiful living things, from insect to man, like all the highest productions of human genius, produce in us a sense of the supernatural. If any reader should say in his heart that I am wrong, that it is not so, that he experiences no such feeling, I can but remind him that not all men possess all human senses and faculties. Some of us—many of us—lack this or that sense which others have. I have even met a man who was without the sense of humour. In the case of our "worm," unbeautiful in itself, yet the begetter of so great a beauty, the sense of something outside of nature which shines on us through nature, even as the sun shines in the stained glass of a church window, is more distinctly felt than in the case of any other insect in our country, because of the rarity of such a phenomenon. It is, with us, unique; but many of us know the winged luminous insects of other lands. Both are beautiful, both mysterious—the winged and the wingless; but one light differs from another in glory even as the stars. The fire-fly is more splendid, more surprising, in its flashes. It flashes and is dark, and we watch, staring at the black darkness, for the succeeding flash. It is like watching for rockets to explode in the dark sky: there is an element of impatience which interferes with the pleasure. To admire and have a perfect satisfaction, the insects must be in numbers, in multitudes, sparkling everywhere in the darkness, so that no regard is paid to any individual light, but they are seen as we see snowflakes.
Glow-worm and firefly
I fancy that Dante, in describing the appearance of glorified souls in heaven, unless he took it all from Ezekiel, had the fire-fly in his mind:
From the bosom
Of that effulgence quivers a sharp flash,
Sudden and frequent in the guise of lightning.
Of all who have attempted to describe and compare the two insects—fire-fly and glow-worm—Thomas Lovell Beddoes is the best. Beddoes himself, in those sudden brilliant letters to his friend Kelsall, of Fareham, in this county, was a sort of human fire-fly. In a letter to Procter, from Milan, 1824, he wrote:
And what else have I seen? A beautiful and far-famed insect—do not mistake, I mean neither the Emperor, nor the King of Sardinia, but a much finer specimen—the fire-fly. Their bright light is evanescent, and alternates with the darkness, as if the swift whirling of the earth struck fire out of the black atmosphere; as if the winds were being set upon that planetary grindstone, and gave out such momentary sparks from their edges. Their silence is more striking than their flashes, for sudden phenomena are almost invariably attended with some noise, but these little jewels dart along the dark as softly as butterflies. For their light, it is not nearly so beautiful and poetical as our still companion of the dew, the glow-worm, with his drop of moonlight.