BOTH SHORT-LIVED INSECTS. 9 



meets him on return 7 and what to him, if repeated in sum- 

 mer's blithest accents, the " prophecy " of a " ripened year," 

 when in its harvests, save their labour, he knows he is to bear 

 no part of fair proportion ? 



The poet to the tree-hopper thus concludes : 



"To thee, of all things upon earth, 

 Life is no longer than thy mirth ; 

 Happy insect ! happy, thou 

 Dost neither age nor winter know ; 

 But when thou 'st drunk and danced and sung 

 Thy fill, the summer leaves among, 

 Sated with thy summer feast, 

 Thou retir'st to endless rest." 



This will do alike for the tree and the grasshopper, since, 

 with both, a short life and a merry one is the allotted condi- 

 tion of being, extended only, we believe, to a few weeks of 

 summer or early autumn. Neither they, their leaves, nor 

 grass, nor " flowers," are much exposed, therefore, to those 

 "frosty fingers" deprecated for the gryllus by the Cavalier 

 Lovelace (writer of our prefatory lines), who, with true cavalier 

 philosophy (only a variation on the Greek Epicurean), thus 

 concludes his address to the English grasshopper : 



"Poor verdant fool! and now green ice; thy joys, 



Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass, 

 Bid us lay in 'gainst winter rain, and poise 

 Their floods with an overflowing glass" 



Anacreon's hopper of the tree and our British hopper of 

 the grass may now surely be allowed to share between them the 

 former's celebrated ode, and the palm of happiness and song. 



