330 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
last reptiles and batrachians which a warm autumnal breeze has 
restored to life. 
Page 188. My muse is the light.—And yet the nightingale loses 
it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that 
it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rem- 
brandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft, 
of the science of chiaro-oscuro. The nightingale begins his song when 
the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun; and 
hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and 
uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light. 
Page 215. Do not say, “ Winter is on my side.”—While M. de 
Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells us that, at the fair of 
Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude of blattes which 
thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not 
be got rid of Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored 
Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of 
the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable 
hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terrible 
scourge than the locusts to the south. 
During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation 
which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists; namely, that 
the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions 
of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of 
these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in ex- 
pectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral 
insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every 
night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice. 
If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, even 
