150 BALANCE OF VITALITY. 



vitality, sensitiveness, and enjoyment, are seldom, in insect 

 life, made to consist with long duration. With them, to live 

 long is not always to live muck, though we may justly say of 

 them, as of other and higher existences, that to live much is to 

 live long. 



The Ephemera,* for instance, in their single day of light and 

 love as tenants of the air may be said to live longer than 

 in the darksome years of their immurement within earth and 

 water ; while the butterfly, fluttering over the flowers of the 

 grave, may enjoy more of existence in that short half-hour of 

 sport and sunshine, than the churchyard beetle in the whole 

 course of its buried career amongst the relics of mortality. 



In this seemingly disproportioned, yet in reality well-ba- 

 lanced allotment of insect life, there exists, as we have noticed, 

 no parallel with the history of the soul, viewed as an immortal 

 principle ; but amongst the instances just adduced, as well as 

 a thousand more, there is not wanting a very marked corre- 

 spondence with the earthly tenures of human existence as most 

 usually holden. 



Which are the lamps of clay found, commonly, to be the 

 soonest broken, and most early committed to their congenial 

 soil? Common observation answers, Those, certainly, in 

 which a brilliant flame has served to exhaust most speedily 

 the animal oil whereon it fed. George Herbert said of him- 

 self, that he had " a wit, like a penknife in too narrow a 



> * See Vignette. 



