74 
LOVE AND DEATH. 
A stronger dose was accordingly administered ; but in vain,—he came 
again to himself. It was a curious circumstance; but it certainly 
seemed as if this kind of intoxication, while weakening and almost 
paralyzing the faculties of motion, had all the more keenly excited the 
nerves, and what we may call the amorous faculties. The use he 
sought to make of his vacillating step and last efforts was to join a 
female of his species which we had found lying dead, and placed upon 
the table. He felt her with his palpi and trembling arms. He con¬ 
trived to turn her over, and tumbled about (very probably he could not 
see) to assure himself whether she was alive. He would not part from 
her: one would have sworn that he had undertaken, though dying, to 
resuscitate the dead. It was a fantastic, a gloomy, and yet, for one 
who knows at heart that all nature is identical, a touching spectacle. 
It afflicted us greatly; we attempted to shorten it by the help of 
the ether, and to separate this Juliet from her Romeo. But the in¬ 
domitable male laughed at all our poisons, and dismally dragged him¬ 
self along. We shut him up in a large box, where he did not die until 
after a considerable period, and incredibly large doses. His punish¬ 
ment—and, reader, you may justly call it ours —endured for fully 
fifteen days. 
This robust, enduring being, with his inextinguishable flame of life, 
threw us into a prolonged reverie. 
On our first dabbling in bloodshed, Nature had wished to show us, 
and with a master’s hand, the strange and unconquerable energy with 
which she has endowed life. “ Love is strong as death.” Where do we 
find this saying? In the Bible. Yes; and it is also the eternal Bible. 
For what more powerfully consecrates existence, and renders it sympa¬ 
thetic, reverend, and sacred ? And how great a pity it is, then, to cut 
it short at the divine moment when every being has its share of God ! 
We excused ourselves by saying that this insect, which lives six 
years in a single night, could have spread its wings beneath the sky but 
two months longer,—just long enough to perpetuate its race. We 
deprived it, therefore, of a very little time—a month out of six or 
seven years. 
Yes; but that month was the epoch to which all its life had tended. 
