AFTER THE FEAST 255 



coming back to the old leafy nook of the country, 

 find the old green hive still in its corner under 

 the lilac, still the centre of what seems the same 

 crowd of winged merchant-women sailing home 

 under the same gay colours, singing the old glad 

 songs, building the old wondrous fabrics in the 

 darkness, transmuting the same fragrant essences 

 into the same elixir of gold. And what is this 

 mysterious thing called the Bee-Commonwealth, 

 which is alone immortal, while all that composes it, 

 and pertains to it, and upholds it, passes and dies ? 

 You must not forget the queen-bee here. She 

 alone, it must be remembered, persists year in 

 and year out, while generation after generation 

 of her children grow up and die about her — a 

 hundred thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve- 

 month, thousands even between one single summer 

 dawn and the dusk of the western sky. Methu- 

 salah of old, on the more moderate human scale, 

 must have had some such experience — must have 

 divined the broader plan of life from the incessant 

 repetitions of chance and change that passed before 

 him. The power to generalise into symbols comes 

 only to the ancient of days ; and he of all men had 

 learnt to fathom, to estimate, to winnow out the 

 sober drab grain from the glittering, rainbow chaff 

 of life. Over and over again he must have kept 

 the true true to itself with one wise word, and 

 turned back the false, dazzled and discomfited, 

 with one flash from his mirror of the ages. He 



