its pearled and glittering bands,
And leave thee homeless by the way.

I know thy peace when all is done.
Each anchored thread, each tiny knot,
Soft shining in the autumn sun;
A sheltered, silent, tranquil lot.

I know what thou hast never known,--
Sad presage to a soul allowed--
That not for life I spin, alone,
But day by day I spin my shroud.

The reference to the sweeping away of the spider's web, of course, implies
the pain often caused to such hardworking girls by the meanness of men who
employ them only to cheat them--shopkeepers or manufacturers who take
their work without justly paying for it, and who criticize it as bad in
order to force the owner to accept less money than it is worth. Again a
reference may be intended to the destruction of the home by some legal
trick--some unscrupulous method of cheating the daughter out of the
property bequeathed to her by her parents.

Notice a few pretty words here. The "pearled" as applied to the spider's
thread gives an intimation of the effect produced by dew on the thread,
but there is also the suggestion of tears upon the thread work woven by
the hands of the girl. The participle "anchored" is very pretty in its use
here as an adjective, because this word is now especially used for
rope-fastening, whether the rope be steel or hemp; and particularly for
the fastening of the cables of a bridge. The last stanza might be
paraphrased thus: "Sister Spider, I know more than you--and that knowledge
makes me unhappy. You do not know, when you are spinning your little web,
that you are really weaving your own shroud. But I know this, my work is
slowly but surely killing me. And I know it because I have a soul--at
least a mind made otherwise than yours."

The use of the word "soul" in the last stanza of this poem, brings me back
to the question put forth in an earlier part of the lecture--why European
poets, during the last two thousand years, have written so little upon the
subject of insects? Three thousand, four thousand years ago, the most
beautiful Greek poetry--poetry more perfect than anything of English
poetry--was written upon insects. In old Japanese literature poems upon
insects are to be found by thousands. What is the signification of the
great modern silence in Western countries upon this delightful topic? I
believe that Christianity, as dogma, accounts for the long silence. The
opinions of the early Church refused soul, ghost, intelligence