A MIDNIGHT RAMBLE. 29 
“soft moths that kiss 
The sweet lips of flowers, and harm not.” 
Bryant often sang of the bee: 
“In meadows red with blossoms all summer long the ‘bee 
Murmurs, and loads his yellow thighs,” 
he says, but leaves us to conjecture the gladness of the blossom 
as it helps the little plunderer load his saddle-bags in the fulfil ! 
ment of a divine design of which his greed is but the instrument. 
“Bees that soar for bloom, 
High as the highest peak of Furness fells,” 
sings Wordsworth again—a rather long flight for an uninvited 
guest !—allusions which occur to my mood as emphasizing a miss- 
ing element in the poetry of flowers, at least in their association 
with insect life. When the poet’s butterfly visits the flower, the 
insect is commonly the hero, the flower but a passive agent or' 
a pretty background in the performance. The bee seeks the 
blossom; the blossom does not consciously await the bee, but! 
always plays second fiddle to his murmuring. They have wed- 
ded the rose to the nightingale, but the beautiful plan of vital 
interdependence and reciprocity unwittingly suggested in the 
line of Hood’s— 
“The broom’s betrothed to the bee ?— 
has been quite generally overlooked by a devoted class of nat- 
ure’s devotees, from whom we had a right to expect a forecast 
of the more philosophical revelations of the scientist, for the poet 
sees, where the scientist merely discovers. 
Browning has proven the seer of the twilight flower, and in a 
tender allegory has truly voiced its perfume. It is the flower 
that now sings, and though “in a gondola,” how like the voice of 
the evening primrose !—or the woodbine !— 
