Strange little republic, that, for all its logic and gravity, its
matured conviction and prudence, still falls victim to so vast and
precarious a dream! Who shall tell us, O little people that are so
profoundly in earnest, that have fed on the warmth and the light and
on nature's purest, the soul of the flowers, wherein matter for once
seems to smile, and put forth it? most wistful effort towards beauty
and happiness,--who shall tell us what problems you have resolved,
but we not yet, what certitudes you have acquired that we still have
to conquer? And if you have truly resolved these problems, and
acquired these certitudes, by the aid of some blind and primitive
impulse and not through the intellect, then to what enigma, more
insoluble still, are you not urging us on? Little city abounding in
faith and mystery and hope, why do your myriad virgins consent to a
task that no human slave has ever accepted? Another spring might be
theirs, another summer, were they only a little less wasteful of
strength, a little less self-forgetful in their ardour for toil; but
at the magnificent moment when the flowers all cry to them, they
seem to be stricken with the fatal ecstasy of work; and in less than
five weeks they almost all perish, their wings broken, their bodies
shrivelled and covered with wounds.

"Tantus amor florum, et generandi gloria mellis!"

cries Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics, wherein he devotes
himself to the bees, and hands down to us the charming errors of the
ancients, who looked on nature with eyes still dazzled by the
presence of imaginary gods.

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