is really the poetry of the bee--visiting only beautiful flowers, and
sucking from them their perfumed juices--always healthy, happy, and
surrounded by beautiful things. A great rover, a constant wanderer is the
bee--visiting many different places, seeing many different things, but
stopping only to enjoy what is beautiful to the sight and sweet to the
taste. Now Emerson tells us that a wise man should act like the bee--never
stopping to look at what is bad, or what is morally ugly, but seeking only
what is beautiful and nourishing for the mind. It is a very fine thought;
and the manner of expressing it is greatly helped by Emerson's use of
curious and forcible words--such as "burly," "zigzag," and the famous
expression "yellow-breeched philosopher"--which has passed almost into an
American household phrase. The allusion of course is to the thighs of the
bee, covered with the yellow pollen of flowers so as to make them seem
covered with yellow breeches, or trousers reaching only to the knees.

I do not of course include in the lecture such child songs about insects
as that famous one beginning with the words, "How doth the little busy bee
improve each shining hour." This is no doubt didactically very good; but I
wish to offer you only examples of really fine poetry on the topic.
Therefore leaving the subject of bees for the time, let us turn to the
subject of musical insects--the singers of the fields and
woods--grasshoppers and crickets.

In Japanese poetry there are thousands of verses upon such insects.
Therefore it seems very strange that we have scarcely anything on the
subject in English. And the little that we do have is best represented by
the poem of Keats on the night cricket. The reference is probably to what
we call in England the hearth cricket, an insect which hides in houses,
making itself at home in some chink of the brickwork or stonework about a
fireplace, for it loves the warmth. I suppose that the small number of
poems in English about crickets can be partly explained by the scarcity of
night singers. Only the house cricket seems to be very well known. But on
the other hand, we can not so well explain the rarity of composition in
regard to the day-singers--the grasshoppers and locusts which can be
heard, though somewhat faintly, in any English country place after sunset
during the warm season. Another queer thing is that the example set by
Keats has not been imitated or at least followed even up to the