122 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
It was doubtless the spell of one of these butterflies that crys- 
tallized the arctic simile of Wordsworth: 
““T’ve watched you now a full half-hour 
Self - poised upon that yellow flower; 
And, little butterfly, indeed 
I know not if you sleep or feed. 
How motionless !—not frozen seas 
More motionless ”’; 
and quickened the insight of Joachim Miller: 
“Gold-barred butterflies, to and fro 
And over the water-side wandered and wove, 
As heedless and idle as clouds that rove 
And drift by the peaks of perpetual snow”; 
for are these Alpine similes not truly prophesied in the nether 
mirror of these folded wings, with their bordering aiguilles, their 
verdant zone beneath their peaked borders, their merging veins 
lof mimic glacial streams and isolated patch of silver, like the 
, tiny lingering remnant of an avalanche in a vast field of striate 
granite? All these wondrous hieroglyphs are here apparent to 
the inward eye, though only revealed to mine, as I have said, as 
though: in a mirror, from this storied wing of a butterfly, the 
“Comma,” captured by my own hand on the ice midway in the 
Mer de Glace of Switzerland. “Every object rightly seen un- 
locks a new faculty of soul,” says Emerson; and while I would 
make no claim, even as the humblest interpreter of the infinite 
design throughout nature—where, as Lubbock believes, from the 
irresistible force of a long array of facts, “not a hair or line or 
‘a spot of color is without a reason, or has not a purpose or a 
meaning,” every touch of the Infinite Creator the symbol of a 
‘ thought and purpose—I may at least offer the tribute of a beau- 
tiful simile which came, not as a guess at truth, but as a swift 
! revelation from the painted wing which I had seen before a hun- 
dred times, a mere gray specimen in my scientific cabinet. Shall 
