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LEARNING FROM AN INSECT. 
Gothic, so little in harmony with either our wants or our ideas, 
has passed out of our furniture, but it still lingers in the shawl-manu¬ 
facture ; a rich and costly industry, which, having once adopted the 
fantastic method of imitating in opaque wools those windows whose 
transparency was their special merit, can hardly emancipate itself from 
the bondage. 
Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex 
designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives 
to carry churches on their backs, men have provided a heavy ground¬ 
work of the stoutest wools; the whole being despatched from London 
and Paris to be servilely woven by the Indians who have unlearned 
their own arts. 
Our intelligent Parisian merchants, who have reluctantly followed 
in the path traced out for them by the great producers, may very well 
escape from these rich and heavy styles. Let some one lose patience, 
and turning his back on the copyists of antique absurdities, go to 
Nature herself in search of advice,—to the great insect collections and 
the conservatories of the Jardin des Plantes. 
Nature, being feminine, will tell him that if he would fitly decorate 
his sister in the soft and airy tissue of the ancient cashmere, he must 
delineate thereupon—not the towers of Notre-Dame,* but a hundred 
charming creatures—that little, but, if you will, very common marvel 
of the cicindela, in which all styles are combined;—or the purple 
scarabseus glorified in its lily;—or the emerald chrysomela, which 
this very morning I found sensually reposing at the bottom of a 
rose. 
Do I mean that you should copy these ? Not at all. I should call 
these living creatures, in their robe of love, from which they derive 
all their charm, an animated aureola, which cannot be translated. 
We must be content to love and contemplate them, to draw our 
inspiration from them, to convert them into ideal forms, and new 
rainbows of colours, and exquisite posies of blossoms. Thus trans- 
* Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris. 
