other stern everlasting words:

_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord
endureth forever._

Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice
of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little
messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then,
the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so
after--the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire--guarding
that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I
wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself--in words
that have grown commonplace since his time--the words of that strange
emperor Hadrian--_Animula, vagula, blandula_!

Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old
Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the
_Proverbs of Solomon_--with the butterfly so strangely crushed between
its pages--had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the
other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel.
Many weary men and women were travelling--in an enforced, yet in some
way humorously understanding, society--from Brooklyn Bridge to the
Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was
4:25--still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe
our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there
was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your
fellow-passengers. Weary men going home--many of them having used them
all day long--have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my
car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at
them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they
had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one
smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat
here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his
own thoughts and his own sad station.

It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by
men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that
men knew women from men, or _vice versa_, yet, at last, there seemed to
dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature
reading a book on the other side of the aisle--a lovely young woman,
with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that
enchantment in her