wild cymbal.

"Quivering as they stand upon the long gold ears of the grain, master
musicians who must die before the coming of Fall, they sound to heaven
their monotonous hymn, which re-echoes even in the darkness of the night.

"And nothing will check their inexhaustible shrilling. When chased away
from the oats and from the wheat, they will migrate to the scorched bushes
which die of thirst in the wastes of sand.

"Upon the leafless shrubs, upon the dried up thistles, which let their
white hair fall and float away, there the sturdily-built insect can be
seen again, filled with enthusiasm, even more and more excited as he
cries,

"Until, at last, opening his wings, now rent into shreds, exasperated,
burning more and more fiercely in the frenzy of his excitement, and with
his eyes of bronze always fixed motionlessly upon the azure sky, he dies
in his song upon the withered grain."

This is difficult to translate at all satisfactorily, owing to the
multitude of images compressed together. But the idea expressed is a fine
one--the courage of the insect challenging the sun, and only chanting more
and more as the heat and the thirst increase. The poem has, if you like,
the fault of exaggeration, but the colour and music are very fine; and
even the exaggeration itself has the merit of making the images more
vivid.

It will not be necessary to quote another text; we shall scarcely have the
time; but I want to translate to you something of another poem upon the
same insect by the modern French poet Jean Aicard. In this poem, as in the
little poem by Gautier, which I quoted to you, the writer puts his thought
in the mouth of the insect, so to say--that is, makes the insect tell its
own story.

"I am the impassive and noble insect that sings in the summer solstice
from the dazzling dawn all the day long in the fragrant pine-wood. And my
song is always the same, regular as the equal course of the season and of
the sun. I am the speech of the hot and beaming sun, and when the reapers,
weary of heaping the sheaves together, lie down in the lukewarm shade, and
sleep and pant in the ardour of noonday--then more than at any other time
do I utter freely and joyously that double-echoing strophe with which my
whole body vibrates. And when nothing else moves in all the land round
about, I palpitate and loudly sound my little drum. Otherwise the sunlight
triumphs; and in the whole landscape nothing is heard but my cry,--like
the j