348 The Honey-Makers 



" Let me vigils keep 

 'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap 

 Startles the wild bee £rom the foxglove bell." 



The bee is as much at home in modern literature as in 

 ancient, and it would be difficult to find a poet who has 

 not given it place in his song. 



In " Paradise Lost " Milton finds room for it : — 



" Awake I the morning shines, and the fresh field 

 Calls us ; we lose the prime, to mark how spring 

 Our tended plants, how blows the citron grove, 

 What drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed. 

 How nature paints her colors, how the bee 

 Sits on the bloom, extracting liquid sweet." 



Modern poets, as we have already seen, do not scorn the 

 conceits of the ancients, and Holmes in his song on Bryant's 

 seventieth birthday gives a new dress to Martial's epigram 

 of the bee entombed in amber. 



" In his own verse the poet still we find. 

 In his own page his memory lives enshrined, 

 As in their amber sweets the smother'd bees, — 

 As the fair cedar, fallen before the breeze. 

 Lies self-embalmed amidst the mouldering trees." 



Tennyson in " Eleanore " thus beautifully uses the poetical 

 conception so common to the ancient writers, of favored 

 ones being fed in infancy by the bees : — 



" Or the yellow-banded bees. 

 Thro' half-open lattices 

 Coming in the scented breeze, 

 Fed thee, a child, lying alone, 

 With whitest honey in fairy gardens cull'd — 

 A glorious child, dreaming alone. 

 In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down. 

 With the hum of swarming bees 

 Into dreamful slumber luU'd." 



