If a leaf rustled, she would start:  And yet she died, a year ago.  How had so frail a thing the heart To journey where she trembled so?  And do they turn and turn in fright, Those little feet, in so much night?

  The light above the poet’s head
  Streamed on the page and on the cloth,
  And twice and thrice there buffeted
  On the black pane a white-winged moth: 
  ’Twas Annie’s soul that beat outside,
  And “Open, open, open!” cried: 

  “I could not find the way to God;
  There were too many flaming suns
  For signposts, and the fearful road
  Led over wastes where millions
  Of tangled comets hissed and burned—­
  I was bewildered and I turned.

  “Oh, it was easy then!  I knew
  Your window and no star beside. 
  Look up and take me back to you!”
  —­He rose and thrust the window wide. 
  ’Twas but because his brain was hot
  With rhyming; for he heard her not.

  But poets polishing a phrase
  Show anger over trivial things;
  And as she blundered in the blaze
  Towards him, on ecstatic wings,
  He raised a hand and smote her dead;
  Then wrote “That I had died instead!”

The lover, or bereaved husband, is writing a poem of which a part is given in the first stanza—­which is therefore put in italics.  The action proper begins with the second stanza.  The soul of the dead woman taps at the window in the shape of a night-butterfly or moth—­imagining, perhaps, that she has still a voice and can make herself heard by the man that she loves.  She tells the story of her wandering in space—­privileged to pass to heaven, yet afraid of the journey.  Now the subject of the poem which the lover happens to be writing inside the room is a memory of the dead woman—­mourning for her, describing her in exquisite ways.  He can not hear her at all; he does not hear even the beating of the little wings at the window, but he stands up and opens the window—­because he happens to feel hot and tired.  The moth thinks that he has heard her, that he knows; and she flies toward him in great delight.  But he, thinking that it is only a troublesome insect, kills her with a blow of his hand; and then sits down to continue his poem with the words, “Oh, how I wish I could have died instead of that dear woman!” Altogether this is a queer poem in English literature, and I believe almost alone of its kind.  But it is queer only because of its rarity of subject.  As for construction, it is very good indeed.

I do not know that it is necessary to quote any more poems upon butterflies or moths.  There are several others; but the workmanship and the thought are not good enough or original enough to justify their use here as class texts.  So I shall now turn to the subject of dragon-flies.  Here we must again be very brief.  References to dragon-flies are common throughout English poetry, but the references signify