The World within a Plant.
“Thefragrance of a carnation,” says a fine writer, “led me to enjoy it frequently and near.” While inhaling the powerful sweet, I heard an extremely soft, but agreeable murmuring sound. It was easy to know that some animal, within the covert, must be the musician, and that the little noise must come from some little body suited to produce it. I am furnished with apparatus of a thousand kinds for close observation. I instantly distended the lower part of the flower, and placing it in a full light, could discover troops of little insects, frisking and capering with wild jollity among the narrow pedestals that supported its leaves, and the little threads that occupied its centre. I was not cruel enough to pull out any one of them, but adapting a microscope to take in, at one view, the whole base of the flower, I gave myself an opportunity of contemplating what they were about, and this for many days together, without giving them the least disturbance.
Under the microscope, the base of the flower extended itself to a large plain; the slender stems of the leaves became trunks of so many stately cedars; the threads in the middle seemed columns of massy structure, supporting at the top their several ornaments; and the narrow places between were enlarged into walks, parterres and terraces.
On the polished bottom of these, brighter than Parian marble, walked in pairs, alone or in large companies, thewinged inhabitants; these, from little dusky flies, for such only the naked eye would have shown them, were raised to glorious glittering animals, stained with living purple and with a glossy gold, that would have made all the labors of the loom contemptible in the comparison.
I could, at leisure, as they walked together, admire their elegant limbs, their velvet shoulders, and their silken wings; their backs vying with the empyrean in its hue; and their eyes, each formed of a thousand others, out-glittering the little planes on a brilliant. I could observe them here singling out their favorite females, courting them with the music of their buzzing wings, with little songs formed for their little organs, leading them from walk to walk among the perfumed shades, and pointing out to their taste the drop of liquid nectar, just bursting from some vein within the living trunk. Here were the perfumed groves, the more than myrtle shades, of the poet’s fancy realized; here the happy lovers spent their days in joyful dalliance; in the triumph of their little hearts, skipped after one another from stem to stem among the painted trees; or winged their short flight to the shadow of some broader leaf, to revel in the heights of all felicity.
Nature, the God of nature, has proportioned the period of existence of every creature to the means of its support. Duration, perhaps, is as much a comparative quality as magnitude; and these atoms of being as they appear to us, may have organs that lengthen minutes, to their perception, into years. In a flower, destined to remain but a few days, length of life, according to our ideas, could not be given to its inhabitants; but it may be, according to theirs. I saw, in the course of observation of this new world, several succeeding generations of the creatures it was peopled with; they passed under my eye, through the several successive states of the egg and the reptile form, in a few hours. After these, they burst forth, at an instant, into full growth and perfection in their wing form. In this, they enjoyed their span of being as much as we do years; feasted, sported, revelled in delights; fed on the living fragrance that poured itself out at a thousand openings at once before them; enjoyed their loves; laid the foundation for their succeeding progeny, and, after a life thus happily filled up, sunk in an easy dissolution. With what joy in their pleasures did I attend the first and the succeeding broods through the full period of their joyful lives! With what enthusiastic transport did I address to each of these yet happy creatures, Anacreon’s gratulations to the cicada:
Blissful insect! what can beIn happiness compared to thee?Fed with nourishment divine,The dewy morning’s sweetest wine,Nature waits upon thee still,And thy fragrant cup does fill;All the fields that thou dost see,All the plants, belong to thee;All that summer hours produce,Fertile made with ripening juice.Man for thee does sow and plough,Farmer he, and landlord thou.Thee the hinds with gladness hear,Prophet of the ripened year;To thee alone, of all the earth,Life is no longer than thy mirth.Happy creature! happy thouDost neither age nor winter know;But when thou’st drank, and danced, and sungThy fill, the flowery leaves among,Sated with the glorious feast,Thou retir’st to endless rest.
Blissful insect! what can beIn happiness compared to thee?Fed with nourishment divine,The dewy morning’s sweetest wine,Nature waits upon thee still,And thy fragrant cup does fill;All the fields that thou dost see,All the plants, belong to thee;All that summer hours produce,Fertile made with ripening juice.Man for thee does sow and plough,Farmer he, and landlord thou.Thee the hinds with gladness hear,Prophet of the ripened year;To thee alone, of all the earth,Life is no longer than thy mirth.Happy creature! happy thouDost neither age nor winter know;But when thou’st drank, and danced, and sungThy fill, the flowery leaves among,Sated with the glorious feast,Thou retir’st to endless rest.
Blissful insect! what can be
In happiness compared to thee?
Fed with nourishment divine,
The dewy morning’s sweetest wine,
Nature waits upon thee still,
And thy fragrant cup does fill;
All the fields that thou dost see,
All the plants, belong to thee;
All that summer hours produce,
Fertile made with ripening juice.
Man for thee does sow and plough,
Farmer he, and landlord thou.
Thee the hinds with gladness hear,
Prophet of the ripened year;
To thee alone, of all the earth,
Life is no longer than thy mirth.
Happy creature! happy thou
Dost neither age nor winter know;
But when thou’st drank, and danced, and sung
Thy fill, the flowery leaves among,
Sated with the glorious feast,
Thou retir’st to endless rest.
While the pure contemplative mind thus almost envies what the rude observer would treat unfeelingly, it naturally shrinks into itself, on the thought that there may be, in the immense chain of beings, many, though as invisible to us as we to the inhabitants of this little flower whose organs are not made for comprehending objects larger than a mite, or more distant than a straw’sbreadth, to whom we may appear as much below regard as these to us.
With what derision should we treat those little reasoners, could we hear them arguing for the unlimited duration of the carnation, destined for the extent of their knowledge, as well as their action. And yet, among ourselves there are reasoners who argue, on no better foundation, that the earth which we inhabit is eternal.