ray as that, but when
the work is so nice one's dress must correspond: it would never do to
rumple round among the rose-leaves, black as a beetle, and expect not
only to be heaped with delicates, but to be intrusted with love-tokens.
One cannot be so splendid as the moths and sphinxes, who have nothing to
do all summer but to lay eggs among the petals that their offspring may
devour them; no, there is work to be done. But though one toils, one has
a dignity to maintain; one remembers it readily when he has been made
the insignia of royalty, when kings have worn his effigy, when popes
have put him in their coats-of-arms; one cannot forget that he has
himself been called the Winged Pontiff of the Flowers. See him now, as
he hovers over the clover, not the red kind,--for him each floret of
that is deep as those shafts of the hashish-eater's dream, where the
broken tubes of the honeysuckle being planted in the sand, their mouths
level with the floor of the desert, they became wells, and the Arab
women dropped their buckets therein and drew them up dripping with
honey,--it is the small white clover on which he alights, whose sweets
are within reach of his little proboscis; or, lost in that great
blue-bell, he swings it with his motion and his melody; or he burrows
deep in the heart of a rose, never rolling there, as it has erroneously
been said, but, collecting the pollen with his pincers, swims over the
flower while brushing it into the baskets of his hinder legs, and then
lights again for a fresh fare, till, laden and regaled, he loudly issues
forth, dusty with treasure; and _les rois faineans_, the Merovingian
kings, who powdered their heads and their beards with gold, were no
finer fellows than he. But a few months' wear and tear will suffice to
tarnish him; by-and-by the little body will be battered and rusty, the
wings will be ragged and worn; one day as he goes home heavily burdened,
if no sailing blue-winged swallow have skimmed him up long ago, the
flagging flight will fail, a breeze will be too much for him, a
rain-drop will dash him down, he will fall, and some garden-toad, the
focal length of whose vision is exactly the distance to which he can
dart his tongue, will see a tired bee blundering across his sky, and
will make a morsel of him, honey-bag, pollen, and all. Yet that is in
the future, far outside the focal length of any bee's vision, that
fortunate vision which finds creation so fair and himself the centre