and as one whose teaching the shadow of years has not tarnished. Here his perceptions winged themselves to their goal as swiftly and as unerringly as the eager bees themselves fly to the hive with each load of nectar when every hour of the summer's day warns them that the golden harvest time is fleeting. He knew that work made the bees cheerful, and that sunny weather cheered their hearts; that discouragement did but make them work the harder, and that death itself, dreaded instinctively by every animate thing, was to them, when set against the common welfare, a thing of naught.
Half playfully, half affectionately, yet wholly respectfully withal, he continually likens the race of bees to the race of men.
I will tell you of sights of tiny things to be wondered at,
Great-hearted leaders, the customs of the whole race,
Their passions, tribes, and battles,
he says in his opening paragraph. In the course of his pages, "grandsires of grandsires are numbered," "the hearts of the bees are agitated in war," "the kings turn to the foe great souls in tiny breasts," "sad funeral rites are conducted." Often in the course of the poem he refers to their homes, their dwellings, their waxed realms and rich storehouses, their palaces and cities—a picturesque phraseology which Maeterlinck repeats with great effect.
"Behold," says Virgil, giving us in one long paragraph a far from uncreditable resume of the life and labors of the bee,
