Birds have their nests; they rear their eager young, And flit on errands all the livelong day; Each field mouse keeps the homestead whence it sprung; But thou art nature's freeman--free to stray Unfettered through the wood, 5 Seeking thine airy food, The sweetness spiced on every blossomed spray.
The garden one wide banquet spreads for thee, O daintiest reveler of the joyous earth! One drop of honey gives satiety; 10 A second draft would drug thee past all mirth. Thy feast no orgy shows; Thy calm eyes never close, Thou soberest sprite to which the sun gives birth.
And yet the soul of man upon thy wings 15 Forever soars in aspiration; thou His emblem of the new career that springs When death's arrest bids all his spirit bow. He seeks his hope in thee Of immortality. 20 Symbol of life, me with such faith endow!
1. What color was the butterfly that the poet watched? What does he imagine it to be in the second stanza? In the third? What does he say about its habits in the fourth stanza? In the fifth?
2. What are the four stages in the life of a butterfly? The Greeks represented Psyche, the soul, with butterfly wings. Why? Express the meaning of the last stanza in your own words.
3. Use these words in sentences of your own: cipher, fostering, imbues, blazonry, satiety, orgy, sprite, arrest, symbol.
4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was an American writer of essays and biography.
The following sketch vividly describes an English traveler's impression of the desert country that lies between Jerusalem and Cairo. Mr. Kinglake had only an interpreter, two Arabian attendants and two camels in his little caravan.
_Eothen_, the title of the volume from which this selection is extracted, is a Greek word meaning "From the East."
Once during this passage my Arabs lost their way among the hills of loose sand that surrounded us, but after a while we were lucky enough to recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a sheik, the head of a family that actually dwells at no great distance 5 from this part of the desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a matchlock, and of this he was inordinately proud, on account of the supposed novelty and ingenuity of the contrivance. We stopped, and sat down and rested awhile, for the sake of a little talk. 10