38 METAMORPHOSES. 



faction of their nature; when no longer confined to the earth, they can 

 traverse the fields of air, their food is the nectar of flowers, and love begins 

 his blissful reign; who that witnesses this interesting scene can help 

 seeing in it a lively representation of man in his threefold state of existence, 

 and more especially of that happy day, when, at the call of the great Sun 

 of Righteousness, " all that are in the graves shall come forth, the sea shall 

 give up her dead, and death being swallowed up of life, the nations of the 

 blessed shall live and love to the ages of eternity ? " 



But although the analogy between the different state of insects and those 

 of the body of man is only general, yet it is much more complete with 

 respect to his soul. He first appears in his frail body a child of the 

 earth, a crawling worm, his soul being in a course of training and prepara- 

 tion for a more perfect and glorious existence. Its course being finished, it 

 casts off the earthly body, and goes into a hidden state of being in Hades, 

 where it rests from its works, and is prepared for its final consummation. 

 The time for this being arrived, it comes forth clothed with a glorious 

 body, not like its former, though germinating from it, for, though "it is 

 sown an animal body, it shall be raised a spiritual body" endowed with aug- 

 mented powers, faculties, and privileges commensurate to its new and 

 happy state. And here the parallel holds perfectly between the insect and 

 the man. The butterfly, the representative of the soul, is prepared in the 

 larva for its future state of glory; and if it be not destroyed by the ichneu- 

 mons and other enemies to which it is exposed, symbolical of the vices that 

 destroy the spiritual life of the soul, it will come to its state of repose in 

 the pupa, which is its Hades; and at length, when it assumes the imago, 

 break forth with new powers and beauty to its final glory and the reign of 

 love. So that in this view of the subject well might the Italian poet 

 exclaim : 



Non v* accorgete voi, che noi siam* vermi, 

 Nati a formar F angelica farfalla F 1 



The Egyptian fable, as it is supposed to be, of Cupid and Psyche, seems 

 built upon this foundation. *' Psyche," says an ingenious and learned 

 writer, " means in Greek the human soul; and it means also a butterfly 2 , of 

 which apparently strange double sense the undoubted reason is, that a 

 butterfly was a very ancient symbol of the soul : from the prevalence of 

 this symbol, and the consequent coincidence of the names, it happened 

 that the Greek sculptors frequently represented Psyche as subject to Cupid 

 in the shape of a butterfly; and that even when she appears in their works 

 under the human form, we find her decorated with the light and filmy wings 

 of that gay insect." s 



The following beautiful little poem falls in so exactly with the subject I 

 have been discussing, that I cannot resist the temptation I feel to copy it 



1 Do you not perceive that we are caterpillars, born to form the angelic but- 

 terfly? 



3 It is worthy of remark, that in the north and west of England the moths that 

 fly into candles are called sanies (souls), perhaps from the old notion that the souls 

 of the dead fly about at night in search of light. For the same reason, probably 

 the common people in Germany call them ghosts (Geistchen). 



3 Nares's Essays, i. 101, 102. 



