244 The Poets and Nature. 



Underlying this, of course, is that pathetic main idea of 

 the poets that " life's a short summer." Men and women 

 are mere insects, "the summer swarm." So the poets, 

 whenever they meet with a beauty the song of birds, the 

 butterfly's colours, the glowworm's spark, a flower in its 

 prime see in it that which is transient, futile, doomed. 

 Both gaiety and merriment have in verse melancholy signi- 

 ficances ; night, winter, death, hold them in reversion. Let 

 the grasshopper chirp : it will die soon. 



" Or, if a different image be recalled 

 By the warm sunshine, and the jocund voice 

 Of insects chirping out their careless lives, 

 On these soft beds of thyme-besprinkled turf, 

 Choose, with the gay Athenian, a conceit ; 

 A sound blithe race ! whose mantles were bedecked 

 With golden grasshoppers, 1 in sign that they 

 Had sprung, like those bright creatures, from the soil." 



Words-worth. 



A very different creature is the locust, "the scourge of 

 Allah," "the army of the One God." 



" A fire devoureth before them ; and behind them a flame 

 burneth : the land is as the garden of Eden before them, 

 and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing 

 shall escape them. 



" Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall 

 they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth 

 the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array." 



Just as Job exhausted for all time to come the poetry of 

 the impregnable majesty of an individual strength in his 

 picture of Leviathan, so Joel, in the chapter of which I have 

 quoted two verses, exhausts the poetry of the irresistible 

 might of multitudes. No poet has ever bettered by a single 



i ' ' Witness that Royal Bourse he bade arise, 



The Mart of merchants from the East and West ; 

 Whose slender summit, pointing to the skies, 

 Still bears, in token of his grateful breast, 

 The golden grasshopper, his chosen crest." Hood, 



