res wet with dew
A living rush of light he flew.

There are very few real poems, however, upon the dragon-fly in English,
and considering the extraordinary beauty and grace of the insect, this may
appear strange to you. But I think that you can explain the strangeness at
a later time. The silence of English poets on the subject of insects as
compared with Japanese poets is due to general causes that we shall
consider at the close of the lecture.

Common flies could scarcely seem to be a subject for poetry--disgusting
and annoying creatures as they are. But there are more poems about the
house-fly than about the dragon-fly. Last year I quoted for you a
remarkable and rather mystical composition by the poet Blake about
accidentally killing a fly. Blake represents his own thoughts about the
brevity of human life which had been aroused by the incident. It is
charming little poem; but it does not describe the fly at all. I shall not
quote it here again, because we shall have many other things to talk
about; but I shall give you the text of a famous little composition by
Oldys on the same topic. It has almost the simplicity of Blake,--and
certainly something of the same kind of philosophy.

Busy, curious, thirsty fly,
Drink with me and drink as I;
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine's a summer, mine's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

The suggestion is that, after all, time is only a very relative affair in
the cosmic order of things. The life of the man of sixty years is not much
longer than the life of the insect which lives but a few hours, days, or
months. Had Oldys, who belongs to the eighteenth century, lived in our own
time, he might have been able to write something very much more curious on
this subject. It is now known that time, to the mind of an insect, must
appear immensely longer than it appears to the mind of a man. It has been
calculated that a mosquito or a gnat moves its wings between four and five
hundred times a second. Now the scientific dissection of such an insect,
under the microscope, justifies the opinion that the insect must be
conscious of each beat of the wings--just as a man feels that he lifts his
arm or bends his head every time that