In poetry this small lyrist is a favourite figure in nearly every description of hot midday, whether the poet be one who is faithful to fact from familiarity-like a Bloomfield, Clare, or Grahame-or one who, like Marvel, Keats, or Shelley, are always in fancy so delightfully in sympathy with the spirit, if not always the letter, of Nature's doings

The poetry of earth is never dead;

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead :

That is the grasshopper's-he takes the lead

In summer luxury-he has never done

With his delights, for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

Come, be happy! lie thee down,
On the fresh grass newly mown,
Where the grasshopper doth sing
Merrily-one joyous thing

In a world of sorrowing.

Marvel too, among his meadows, is just as sympathetic.

Or the more naturalistic poets :

It is high noon,

KEATS.

SHELLEY.

Granted, then, that it is a summer insect-that it is in the days of heat one hears it most loquacious-how odd it is that the fable should have survived that it "died in October"! It does not, of course, do anything of the kind, but simply withdraws into its place and sleeps through the winter. As every one knows, it is a rule of nature every winged insect shall die within the year (the occasional individuals that survive the twelvemonth only proving the rule), for the stage of wings is the last third of the creature's life. After all, it would be very absurd if we did not recognise among ourselves the stages of childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, which together cover the span of our "three score years and ten." An insect's stages proceed in a far smaller compass, and the winged one is the last. It is really the old age of the caterpillar or grub. Thus a grasshopper may be for two or

three years a grub, for another six months a hobbledehoy-that is, a wingless thing, half grub, half grasshopper-and then for a further space a winged grasshopper. In the last stage it marries, and there is an end of its purpose. Nature has no further need for it, and does not care whether it dies or not. The slender fragility of the insect's appearance may have suggested a feeble hold of life; some grasshoppers look like the mere spectres of insects. About others too there is a vegetable, perishable look, as of thin grass-blades that a frost would kill or heat shrivel up; suspicion about their sere and faded edges that they are already beginning to wither. But the grasshopper has nothing to complain of as to its length of life. It sings the summer in and the autumn out, and goes to sleep with the year. The cricket differs but little from the grasshopper

And again

Beside yon pool as smooth as glass,

Reflecting every cloud,
Securely hid among the grass,

The crickets chirrup loud.

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be,
Where all the noises that on peace intrude
Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,

Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

As a matter of fact this insect is, I fancy, only the grasshopper over again, but used under another name for the sake of variety, for it not only "pipes," sings, "chirps" (in Clare), "twitters," and (in Leyden) even "pitters," exactly like the grasshopper, but has all other points in common with it. (There is no very common out-ofdoors cricket in England.) Cowper calls it a "locust" in his appeal to the swallow

Arctic maid! with honey fed,

Bearest thou to thy callow brood
Yonder locust from the mead,
Destined their delicious food?

Ye have kindred voices clear,
Ye alike unfold the wing,
Migrate hither, sojourn here,

Both attendant on the Spring.

Ah! for pity drop the prize;
Let it not with truth be said
That a songster gasps and dies

That a songster may be fed.

The domestic cricket that "by the fireside unmolested sings ".

Blithe as the lark, as crickets gay,

That chirrup on the hearth

finds more distinctive notice, and is universally a favourite. The poet is " blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge." The idea-and one not altogether without foundation-that the superior comforts of fireside life lengthen the insect's life is often hinted at, and in the following explicitly set forth :—

Little inmate full of mirth,

Chirping on my humble hearth,
Whereso'er be thy abode,
Always harbinger of good.

Though in voice and shape may be,
Form'd as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a Summer song,
Thine endures the Winter long,
Unimpair'd, and shrill, and clear,
Melody throughout the year.
Neither night nor dawn of day,
Puts a period to thy lay.

Underlying this, of course, is that pathetic main idea of the poets that "life's a short summer." Men and women are mere insects, "the summer swarm." So the poets, whenever they meet with a beauty-the song of birds, the butterfly's colours, the glowworm's spark, a flower in its prime-see in it that which is transient, futile, doomed. Both gaiety and merriment have in verse melancholy significances; night, winter, death, hold them in reversion. Let the grasshopper chirp it will die soon.

A very different creature is the locust, "the scourge of Allah," "the army of the One God."

A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.

Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.

Just as Job exhausted for all time to come the poetry of the impregnable majesty of an individual strength in his picture of Leviathan, so Joel, in the chapter of which I have quoted two verses, exhausts the poetry of the irresistible might of multitudes. No poet has ever bettered by a single thought the verses of Job, nor any after him added a force or a beauty to the lines of Joel.

The locust has but one aspect in poetry-that of a multitudinous evil

As, borne by winds along, in baleful cloud,
Embody'd locusts from the wing descend,

VOL. CCLXIII. NO. 1879

On herb, fruit, flow'r, and kill the rip'ning year,
While waste behind, destruction in their track,
And ghastly famine wait.

MALLET.

They serve, therefore, as a simile for anything that desolates or devours-" Gaul's locust host," or any other enemy of Britain or of "Freedom"; armies of all kinds; the minions of tyranny; corrupt courtiers; Jesuits. They are "tree-blasting," "sky-clouding," "blackening all the ground," "in darksome clouds," "hosts that desolate the earth and dim the day," "barb'rous millions," "greedy troops," "endless legions on sounding wings," "thick-phalanxed as when plaguing Samarcand," "dire with horrid swarms." Nearly every poet at one time or another has told "what deeds of woe the locust can perform"; but their language toils in vain after the consuming, overwhelming reality such as the prophet saw it from the mountain side in Palestine-" a day of clouds and thick darkness—a great people and a strong."

Milton's passage on the Plague is noble :—

As when the potent rod

Of Amram's son, in Egypt's evil day,

Wav'd round the coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud
Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind,
That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like night, and darken'd all the land of Nile.

And Heber too rises to the theme :

The dreadful wand, whose godlike sway
Could lure the locust from her airy way,
With reptile war assail their proud abodes,
And mar the giant pomps of Egypt's gods.

But I do not know where else in poetry to look for an adequate reference to this terrific phenomenon of the locust, the little insect which the Arabs grind up to make flour for cakes, yet compared with which the devastating armies of man are benevolent agencies.

I have myself followed both. Where the army had passed, the villages were empty shells, the green crops had been cut down lest they should ripen, the melon-fields hacked to bits lest they should bear fruit, the wells befouled with the carcasses of dead beasts. Fire had been there, and the fury of swords. And yet there was greenness left, and, though of a poor sort, gleanings for animals. The injury done was not intolerable; the land was habitable. In the other case there had been neither brand nor blade, and no malevolence. And yet there was nothing left, neither for the camel searching the tops of the mimosas nor for the mule sniffing for

herbage between the stones on the ground. The earth was shaved close The bushes were more bare than in mid-winter. The only well we found stank to the skies with a fathom's depth of dead locusts. It was the difference between discomfort and starvation, mischief and ruin. And Joel says, "The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run." The translation probably is in error, and, I should think, should read, "and their coming is as the coming of horsemen " &c. Their passing was like the rush of infinite cavalry at a distance, the air all rattling with harness and glinting with sparks of silver and steel and scarlet. "And the Lord shall utter his voice before his army "-that voice of the whirlwind with which Jehovah spoke in the desert to Moses; the voice of nature is real, earnest, indisputable, and authentic.

PHIL ROBINSON.

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