und
with its shroud to lie down in what is a striking similitude of death,
presented it to the Indians, and then having waited until the
butterfly came out, asked them what they called this process, and
applied the word for it to the resurrection. Dante says:--

"Perceive ye not we are of a wormlike kind,
Born to bring forth the angel butterfly,
That soars to Judgment, and no screen doth find?
Why doth your soul lift up itself on high?
Ye are as insects yet but half complete,
As worms in whom their growth fails utterly."

It is with regard to bees and ants, however, that Dante's observant
love of nature and of natury study is especially to be admired. It is
true, as has been often pointed out, that the older poets, of whom
Dante was an assiduous and mindful reader, made use of figures with
regard to bees, and Virgil, with all of whose works Dante was so
intimately acquainted that nothing must have escaped him, devoted one
of the four books of his Georgics to what is practically a treatise on
Apiculture. In this most of the problems of bee raising are discussed.
Lucretius, Lucan, and Ovid, all made use of this interesting insect
for figures in their poetry. Dante might have obtained most of the
references to the bee, then, from his reading. Prof. Kuhns is of the
opinion, however, that some at {359} least of Dante's references to
them are due to his observations, quite apart from his literary
reminiscences with regard to their habits and instincts. He says:--

"There are certain touches in the Divina Commedia which seem to
prove that Dante's use of them was not entirely conventional. In the
wonderful passage where he stands contemplating

'La forma general di Paradiso,'

he saw the Blessed in the shape of a great white rose on the banks
of the river of light; and the white-robed angels, with wings of
gold and faces of flame, as they fly unceasingly back and forth from
the seats of the saints to the effulgent river, are compared to
bees, following their inborn instinct to make honey, flying from
flower to flower, burying themselves in the chalice, and then rising
heavily to carry their burden to their hives. In another passage
their buzzing noise is compared to the noise of a distant
waterfall;"--a touch of nature that could only have come from
familiarity with the insects.

In is with regard to ants even more than bees that Dante's
proclivities for nature study are