This is really the poetry of the bee—­visiting only beautiful flowers, and sucking from them their perfumed juices—­always healthy, happy, and surrounded by beautiful things.  A great rover, a constant wanderer is the bee—­visiting many different places, seeing many different things, but stopping only to enjoy what is beautiful to the sight and sweet to the taste.  Now Emerson tells us that a wise man should act like the bee—­never stopping to look at what is bad, or what is morally ugly, but seeking only what is beautiful and nourishing for the mind.  It is a very fine thought; and the manner of expressing it is greatly helped by Emerson’s use of curious and forcible words—­such as “burly,” “zigzag,” and the famous expression “yellow-breeched philosopher”—­which has passed almost into an American household phrase.  The allusion of course is to the thighs of the bee, covered with the yellow pollen of flowers so as to make them seem covered with yellow breeches, or trousers reaching only to the knees.

I do not of course include in the lecture such child songs about insects as that famous one beginning with the words, “How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour.”  This is no doubt didactically very good; but I wish to offer you only examples of really fine poetry on the topic.  Therefore leaving the subject of bees for the time, let us turn to the subject of musical insects—­the singers of the fields and woods—­grasshoppers and crickets.

In Japanese poetry there are thousands of verses upon such insects.  Therefore it seems very strange that we have scarcely anything on the subject in English.  And the little that we do have is best represented by the poem of Keats on the night cricket.  The reference is probably to what we call in England the hearth cricket, an insect which hides in houses, making itself at home in some chink of the brickwork or stonework about a fireplace, for it loves the warmth.  I suppose that the small number of poems in English about crickets can be partly explained by the scarcity of night singers.  Only the house cricket seems to be very well known.  But on the other hand, we can not so well explain the rarity of composition in regard to the day-singers—­the grasshoppers and locusts which can be heard, though somewhat faintly, in any English country place after sunset during the warm season.  Another queer thing is that the example set by Keats has not been imitated or at least followed even up to the present time.

  The poetry of earth is never dead: 
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, etc.

In this charming composition you will have noticed the word “stove”; but you must remember that this is not a stove as we understand the term now, and signifies only an old-fashioned fireplace of brick or tile.  In Keats’s day there were no iron stoves.  Another word which I want to notice is the word “poetry” in the first line.  By the poetry of nature the poet means