These are fair examples of the French manner of treating the interesting subject of insects in poetry.  If you should ask me whether the French poets are better than the English, I should answer, “In point of feeling, no.”  The real value of such examples to the student should be emotional, not descriptive.  I think that the Japanese poems on insects, though not comparable in point of mere form with some of the foreign poems which I have quoted, are better in another way—­they come nearer to the true essence of poetry.  For the Japanese poets have taken the subject of insects chiefly for the purpose of suggesting human emotion; and that is certainly the way in which such a subject should be used.  Remember that this is an age in which we are beginning to learn things about insects which could not have been even imagined fifty years ago, and the more that we learn about these miraculous creatures, the more difficult does it become for us to write poetically about their lives, or about their possible ways of thinking and feeling.  Probably no mortal man will ever be able to imagine how insects think or feel or hear or even see.  Not only are their senses totally different from those of animals, but they appear to have a variety of special senses about which we can not know anything at all.  As for their existence, it is full of facts so atrocious and so horrible as to realize most of the imaginations of old about the torments of hell.  Now, for these reasons to make an insect speak in poetry—­to put one’s thoughts, so to speak, into the mouth of an insect—­is no longer consistent with poetical good judgment.  No; we must think of insects either in relation to the mystery of their marvellous lives, or in relation to the emotion which their sweet and melancholy music makes within our minds.  The impressions produced by hearing the shrilling of crickets at night or by hearing the storm of cicadae in summer woods—­those impressions indeed are admirable subjects for poetry, and will continue to be for all time.

When I lectured to you long ago about Greek and English poems on insects, I told you that nearly all the English poems on the subject were quite modern.  I still believe that I was right in this statement, as a general assertion; but I have found one quaint poem about a grasshopper, which must have been written about the middle of the seventeenth century or, perhaps, a little earlier.  The date of the author’s birth and death are respectively 1618 and 1658.  His name, I think, you are familiar with—­Richard Lovelace, author of many amatory poems, and of one especially famous song, “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars”—­containing the celebrated stanza—­

  Yet this inconstancy is such
    As you too shall adore;
  I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
    Loved I not honour more.

Well, as I said, this man wrote one pretty little poem on a grasshopper, which antedates most of the English poems on insects, if not all of them.