The Life of the Bee 



most particular care. From that moment, 

 possessed of a dual sex, having within her 

 an inexhaustible male, she begins her veri- 

 table life ; she will never again leave the 

 hive, unless to accompany a swarm ; and 

 her fecundity will cease only at the ap- 

 proach of death. 



[88] 



Prodigious nuptials these, the most 

 fairylike that can be conceived, azure and 

 tragic, raised high above life by the im- 

 petus of desire ; imperishable and terrible, 

 unique and bewildering, solitary and infi- 

 nite. An admirable ecstasy, wherein 

 death supervening in all that our sphere 

 has of most limpid and loveliest, in vir- 

 ginal, limitless space, stamps the instant 

 of happiness in the sublime transparence 

 of the great sky ; purifying in that im- 

 maculate light the something of wretched- 

 ness that always hovers around love, 

 320 



