I2 2 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 



It was doubtless the spell of one of these butterflies that crys- 

 tallized the arctic simile of Wordsworth: 



"I've watched you now a full half-hour 

 Self -poised upon that yellow flower; 

 And, little butterfly, indeed 

 I know not if you sleep or feed. 

 How motionless ! not frozen seas 

 More motionless " ; 



and quickened the insight of Joachim Miller: 



"Gold -barred butterflies, to and fro 

 And over the water -side wandered and wove, 

 As heedless and idle as clouds that rove 

 And drift by the peaks of perpetual snow"; 



for are these Alpine similes not truly prophesied in the nether 

 mirror of these folded wings, with their bordering aiguilles, their 

 verdant zone beneath their peaked borders, their merging veins 

 of mimic glacial streams and isolated patch of silver, like the 

 tiny lingering remnant of an avalanche in a vast field of striate 

 granite? All these wondrous hieroglyphs are here apparent to 

 the inward eye, though only revealed to mine, as I have said, as 

 though in a mirror, from this storied wing of a butterfly, the 

 " Comma," captured by my own hand on the ice midway in the 

 Mer de Glace of Switzerland. " Every object rightly seen un- 

 locks a new faculty of soul," says Emerson; and while I would 

 make no claim, even as the humblest interpreter of the infinite 

 design throughout nature where, as Lubbock believes, from the 

 irresistible force of a long array of facts, " not a hair or line or 

 a spot of color is without a reason, or has not a purpose or a 

 meaning," every touch of the Infinite Creator the symbol of a 

 thought and purpose I may at least offer the tribute of a beau- 

 tiful simile which came, not as a guess at truth, but as a swift 

 revelation from the painted wing which I had seen before a hun- 

 dred times, a mere gray specimen in my scientific cabinet. Shall 



