58

TO THE MAY-FLY.

Thy joyous gambols as I see,
May-fly, I'd almost wish to be

Such thing of brief duration,

To sport, like thee, one little day,

Nor pass through years of slow decay,

To reach life's termination.

But ah! what graceless wish breathed I?
How little knowledge, brilliant Fly,

Of thy existence shewing:

Still less of that I call my own,

How heedless of the precious boon,

And Him to whom 'tis owing!

Bright insect, ere thy filmy wing,
Expanding on the breath of spring,
Quivered with brief enjoyment;
"Twas thine for years immured to dwell
Within a lone and gloomy cell,

To eat, thy sole employment.

Within that cavern dark and dank,
Scooped in a streamlet's oozy bank,

Its walls the water laving,

Thy form and nature incomplete,

Earth was thy home, and earth thy meat,

So coarse and vile thy craving.

TO THE MAY-FLY.

To these long years, thy life's dark part,
How much within my earth-bound heart,

Too close resemblance holding!

But light and joy, for one day thine,
From age to age may yet be mine,
Their endless beams unfolding.

59

THE day approaches on which oak-apples, bearing their gilded honours, will perpetuate the memory of those their ancestral fruits, which hung, in company with a hunted monarch, on the tree of Boscobel. Whether dressed in tinsel, or adorned by Nature's painting, these apples of royalty are pretty things to look at; and against the coming anniversary (the 29th of May), which will bring them within the reach of all, it may

be worth inquiring whether they have aught within deserving notice; or whether, as with the merry monarch's self, they are to be estimated only for their outward bravery.

Pleasant to the taste these fair fruits are not (as well we know by bitter experiences of childhood); so not daring to bite, let us pull one of them asunder, or, dividing it with a knife, reveal its secrets. We now see, surrounded and bounded by spongy pulp, a set of cells, each with its solitary living occupant for whose safe keeping, and that of his fellows, this fruitlike tenement was called into existence, not by the labours of a trifling artificer, but by the touch of a flying fairy. The insect tenants of these pulpy palaces are not unlike, in one condition of their being, to the scions of royal houses. It is not improbable that before one of them has attained to the majority. of its winged estate, all may be despoiled of their inheritance by a host of usurping parasites, such as, in palaces reared by hands, have often enacted a resembling part.

The above description of a common oak-apple, its Gall-fly occupant, and Ichneumon intruder, may seem over-fanciful; but in writing of Galls, our pen may possibly be carried from the dry land of simple fact by some spirit of fiction in our ink,

-an infusion, it is likely, of gall-nuts, the produce of the East, the very region of romance. With graver pens than ours, Fancies. would seem, indeed, to have been the very growth of Galls; for, descanting on their origin, an Italian entomologist,*

* Redi.

62

RABBINICAL FANCIES.

an observant naturalist,-one who waged war, moreover, with Popular Fallacies,-imagined that Oak-apples and other Galls were animated, nay, brought into being by a soul—not an animal but a vegetative and sensitive soul-in the plant itself. To account for the mysterious entrance of life into the centre of an imperforate ball, he might just as well have adopted, and slightly modified to suit his purpose, the no less imaginative notion of some learned Jewish Rabbins, who believed, or, not believing, taught that human souls transmigrate after death into leaves and buds. "For certain crimes," they would have it, "a soul goes into the leaf of a tree; the wind then rises, and shaking it about causes great torment. This punishment ceases when the leaf falls to the ground: though sometimes, indeed, such a soul passes from leaf to leaf through several."

Before we throw these learned bubbles entirely away, suppose we, in sport, toss up the last of them, just to make with it another random hit at the origin of life in the oak-apple. Let us fancy, with the sagacious Rabbins, an erring soul incarcerate within a single leaf, or wandering from one green prison to another. A portion of its guilt thus expiated, we may imagine it in remittance of punishment, and, as a first step towards restoration, permitted to throw aside its mere vegetable skin, and to put on an animal form (albeit one of the very lowest), as the grub, or even egg of a gall-nut insect. Under a transition so important as the recovery of an animal shape, however insignificant, could a poor soul do other