1 74 The Poets and Nature. 



or pupae, receive from them an amount of attention which 

 even in a monthly nurse would be called unconscionably 

 fussy. Every time the weather changes, the neuters shift 

 the eggs and young so as to give them the advantage of as 

 much warmth as possible, and when they are in their eating 

 stages, are perpetually at their mouth with food. In winter, 

 however, the community is dormant, torpid. The males 

 and females are dead, and the surviving neuters hybernate 

 in the lowest chambers of the nest, in company with their 

 helpless charges. These facts are, therefore, damaging to 

 the poetical pictures of the insect securely feasting in its 

 barns during the winter months : 



" The wiser emmet quoted just before 

 In summer time ranges the fallows o'er, 

 With pains and labour to lay in his store. 

 But when the blustering north with ruffling blasts 

 Saddens the year, and nature overcasts, 

 The prudent insect hid in privacy, 

 Enjoys the fruits of his past industry." 



Nor is it correct to imagine that the race enjoys a longer 

 life than other insects, for the males and females, which are 

 the perfect insects, die, as all other] insects do, within the 

 twelve-month. A proportion of the neuters survive to the 

 following spring, in order to tend the next year's brood, but 

 not, so to speak, for the enjoyment of a renewed existence 

 on their own account. Cowley, therefore, is not over 

 fortunate in his. moral 



" Wisely the ant against poor winter hoards 

 The stock which summer's wealth affords ; 

 In grasshoppers that must at autumn die, 

 How vain were such an industry ! " 



Nor Green in " The Fable of the Old Comedian," the grass- 

 hopper being the thriftless moralist of the poem 



' ' My wretched end may warn green springing youth 

 To use delights as toys that will deceive, 



