uy it of him to enrich their best
Muscats. The great globes of the grape on which the wind and weather
have breathed a bloom, pulped with rain, and sweetened with sun, the
dew-drops slipping down among them as they stir beneath the weight of
some bird that springs from the stem into the sky,--these lend their
beauty and innocence as a kind of chrism to cover the profanities of
wine, which, before it can be used at all, undergoes a kind of
decomposition; but the wild wine of the bramble-rose has no need of its
youth in apology for its age. It is stainless honey still; the sweet
earth-juices stole up the tiny ducts of the flower to secrete it;
showers and odors, warmth and balm, distilled together into the nectary
to give it wealth and savor; it yet preserves the essence of long summer
days, of serene nights, of wandering winds, of mingled blossoms; it is
the link between vegetable and animal productions; it has undergone the
processes of a higher organization than that of the plant; it is, in
fact, the bee himself, and not all the art of all the laboratories can
reproduce it. Into all these other secondary products some stain of
humanity enters; but little sinless sprites of greenwood and glen alone
share the occult science of this with the blossoms. As light and heat
are the generative forces of the world, honey seems to be their first
result; it is lapped, indeed, in flowers, but it looks like candied
sunshine. From the beginning, it has been regarded as a sacred
substance; some have supposed it the earliest element of vegetation. The
ancients made offering of it to the souls of the departed; they
preserved their dead in its incorruptible medium; they sacrificed it to
the gods. "With honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee,"
said the Psalmist, as if earth had nothing more to give. Nor has it to
our bee. Let him fill his honey-vesicle, he will regurgitate the deposit
into a cell that he closes with a thin waxen pellicle, or into another
already partially occupied by the farina of flowers, which he knows to
be perishable, and therefore secludes from the air in the same fashion
that the Romans used to seal their flasks of Falernian,--with a few
drops of honey at the mouth. Give him a grain of pollen, a taste of
stagnant water, a drop of honey, and kings could not enrich him. The
honey is his food, in the stagnant water he finds salts requisite as
remedies; but what the bee wants with the grain of pollen is still