is it really dead now,
or do we, who have watched the creature thus far, despair and call it lost?
Do we not rather rejoice that it rests from its labours, and that the
period of its glorification is at hand?

In the silent chrysalis state then our _Psyche_ sleeps away awhile,
unaffected by the vicissitudes around it; and, at last, when its appointed
day arrives, bursts from its cerements, and rises in the air a winged and
joyous being, to meet the sun which warmed it into new life. Now it is a
_butterfly_,--bright emblem of pleasure unalloyed.

This happy consummation, however, is only for the chrysalis which has not
within it the devouring worm, the fruit of the ichneumon's egg, harboured
during the {36} caterpillar state--and emblem, in the human soul, of some
deadly sin yielded to during life, and which afterwards becomes the gnawing
"worm that dieth not." For in this case, instead of the bright butterfly,
there issues forth from the chrysalis-shell only a swarm of black,
ill-favoured flies, like a troop of evil spirits coming from their feast on
a fallen soul.

If a caterpillar were gifted with a foreknowledge of his butterfly future,
so far transcending his inglorious present, we could imagine that he would
be only impatient to get through his caterpillar duties, and rejoice to
enter the chrysalis state as soon as he was fitted for it. How
short-sighted then would a caterpillar appear who should endeavour, while
in that shape, to emulate the splendour of the butterfly by some wretched
temporary substitute, adding a few more, or brighter stripes than nature
had given it; or, again, if one whose great change was drawing near, should
attempt to conceal its visible approach by painting over the fading hues of
health, and plastering up the wrinkles of its outward covering, so soon to
be thrown off altogether; instead of striving for inward strength and
beauty, which would never decline, but be infinitely expanded in the
butterfly--and regarding the earthly beauty's wane as the dawn of the
celestial.

[Illustration: VI.]

{37} With these and similar reflections before us (which might be
multiplied _ad infinitum_), we shall no longer look upon the caterpillar as
a mere unsightly and troublesome reptile, the chrysalis as an
unintelligible curiosity, and the butterfly as a pretty painted thing and
nothing more; but regard them as _together_ forming one of those beautiful
and striking illustrations with which the book