Gay creatures of the element, That in the colors of the rainbow live.—Milton.
Speak to me as to thy thinkings.—Shakespeare.
It happened to me once to spend a long summer afternoon under a linden-tree, reading "Middlemarch." The branches were loaded with blossoms, and the heavy perfume attracted the bees from far and near, insomuch that my ears were all the time full of their humming. Butterflies also came, though in smaller numbers, and silently. Whenever I looked up from my book I was sure to find at least one or two fluttering overhead. They were mostly of three of our larger sorts,—the Turnus, the Troilus, and the Archippus (what noble names!), beautifully contrasted in color. The Turnus were evidently the remnant of a brood which had nearly passed away; their wings showed that they had been exposed to the wear and tear of a long life, as butterflies reckon. Some of them were painful to look at, and I remember one in particular, so maimed and helpless that, with a sudden impulse of , I rose and stepped upon it. It seemed an act of mercy to send the wretched cripple after its kindred. As I looked at these loiterers, with their and faded wings,—some of them half gone,—I found myself, almost before I knew it, thinking of Dorothea Brooke, of whose lofty ideals, bitter disappointments, and partial joys I was reviewing the story. After all, was there really any wide difference between the two lives? One was longer, the other shorter; but only as one dewdrop another on the grass.
 
"A moment's halt, a taste
Of Being from the well amid the waste,
And lo! the has reach'd
The Nothing it set out from."
Then I fell to , as I had often done before, upon the mystery of an insect's life and mind.
 
This tiger swallow-tail, that I had just trodden into the ground,—what could have been its impressions of this curious world whereinto it had been so unceremoniously, and in which its day had been so transient? A month ago, a little more or a little less, it had emerged from its silken , dried its splendid party-colored wings in the sun, and forthwith had gone sailing away, over the pasture and through the wood, in quest of something, it could hardly have known what. Nobody had welcomed it. When it came, the last of its ancestors were already among the ancients. Without father or mother, without or childhood, it was born full-grown, and set out, once for all, upon an independent adult existence. What such a state of uninitiated, uninstructed being may be like let those imagine who can.
 
It was born adult, I say; but at the same time, it was freer from care than the most favored of human children. No one ever gave it a lesson or set it a task. It was never restrained nor reproved; neither its own conscience nor any outward authority ever imposed the lightest check upon its desires. It had nobody's pleasure to think of but its own; for as it was born too late to know father or mother, so also it died too soon to see its own offspring. It made no plans, needed no estate, was subject to no ambition. Summer was here when it came , and summer was still here when it passed away. It was born, it lived upon honey, it loved, and it died. Happy and brief biography!
 
Happy and brief; but what a multitude of questions are suggested by it! Did the creature know anything of its preëxistence, either in the chrysalis or earlier? If so, did it look back upon that far-away time as upon a golden age? Or was it really as careless as it seemed, neither brooding over the past nor dreaming of the future? Was it aware of its own beauty, seeing itself some day reflected in the pool as it came to the edge to drink? Did it recognize smaller butterflies—the white and the yellow, and even the "copper"—as poor relations; felicitating itself, meanwhile, upon its own superior size, its brilliant orange-red eye-spots, and its gorgeous tails? Did it mourn over its faded broken wings as age came on, or when an unexpected drove it sharply against a thorn? Or was it enabled to take every mischance and change in a spirit, perceiving all such evils to have their due and necessary place in the order of Nature? Was it frig............