“Happy must be the State
    Whose ruler heedeth more
    The murmurs of the poor
  Than flatteries of the great.”

The reference to the Song of Songs—­also the Song of Solomon and Canticle of Canticles—­may require a little explanation.  The line “Comely but black withal,” is borrowed from a verse of this song—­“I am black but beautiful, oh, ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.”  In another part of the song the reason of this blackness is given:  “I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.”  From which we can see that the word black only means dark, brown, tanned by the sun.  Perhaps you do not know that as late as the middle of the eighteenth century it was still the custom in England to speak of a person with black hair and eyes as “a black man”—­a custom which Charles Lamb had reason to complain of even at a later day.  The tents referred to in the text were probably tents made of camel-skin, such as the Arabs still make, and the colour of these is not black but brown.  Whether Solomon wrote the so-called song or not we do not know; but the poet refers to a legend that it was written in praise of the beauty of the dark queen who came from Sheba to visit the wisest man of the world.  Such is not, however, the opinion of modern scholars.  The composition is really dramatic, although thrown into lyrical form, and as arranged by Renan and others it becomes a beautiful little play, of which each act is a monologue.  “Sensuous” the poet correctly calls it; for it is a form of praise of woman’s beauty in all its details, as appears in such famous verses as these:  “How beautiful are thy feet in shoes, O prince’s daughter; the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.  Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins which feed among the lilies.”  But Christianity, instead of dismissing this part of the Bible, interpreted the song mystically—­insisting that the woman described meant the Church, and the lover, Christ.  Of course only very pious people continue to believe this; even the good Whittier preferred the legend that it was written about the Queen of Sheba.

I suppose that I ought to end this lecture upon insect poetry by some quotation to which a moral or philosophical meaning can be attached.  I shall end it therefore with a quotation from the poet Gray.  The poetry of insects may be said to have first appeared in English literature during the second half of the eighteenth century, so that it is only, at the most, one hundred and fifty years old.  But the first really fine poem of the eighteenth century relating to the subject is quite as good as anything since composed by Englishmen upon insect life in general.  Perhaps Gray referred especially to what we call May-flies—­those delicate ghostly insects which hover above water surfaces in fine weather, but which die on the same day that they are born.  He does not specify May-flies, however, and we may consider the moral of the poem quite apart from any particular kind of insect.  You will find this reference in the piece entitled “Ode on the Spring,” in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas.