BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY. 207 



Some of them were painful to look at, and 

 I remember one in particular, so maimed 

 and helpless that, with a sudden impulse of 

 compassion, 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 frayed 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 outlasts 

 another on the grass. 



" A moment's halt, a momentary taste 

 Of Being from the well amid the waste, 

 And lo ! the phantom caravan has reach'd 

 The Nothing it set out from." 



Then I fell to musing, 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 ushered so uncere- 



