Thus the Cicada is forced to labour for long gloomy years in the darkness before it can emerge from the soil. At the moment when it issues from the earth the larva, soiled with mire, "resembles a sewer-man; its eyes are whitish, nebulous, squinting, blind." Then "it clings to some twig, it splits down the back, rejects its discarded skin, drier than horny parchment, and becomes the Cigale, which is at first of a pale grass-green hue." Then, "Half drunken with her joy, she feasts In a hail of fire"; And all day long drinks of the sugared sap of tender bark, and is silent only at night, sated with light and heat. The song, which forms part of the majestic symphony of the harvest-tide, announces merely its delight in existence. Having passed years underground, the cigale has only a month to reign, to be happy in a world of light, under the caressing sun. Judge whether the wild little cymbals can ever be loud enough "to celebrate such felicity, so well earned and so ephemeral"! (13/3.) All sing for happiness, each after its kind, through the calm of the summer days. Their minds are intoxicated; it is their fashion of praying, of adoring, of expressing "the joys of life: a full crop and the sun on the back." Even the humble grasshopper rubs its flanks to express its joy, raises and lowers its shanks till its wing-cases squeak, and is enchanted with its own music, which it commences or terminates suddenly "according to the alternations of sun and shade." Each insect has its rhythm, strident or barely perceptible; the music of the thickets and fallows caressed by the sun, rising and falling in waves of joyful life. The insects make merry; they hold uproarious festival; and they mate insatiably; even before forming a mutual acquaintance; in a furious rush of living, for "love is the sole joy of the animal," and "to love is to die." Hardly unwrapped, still dusty from the strenuous labour of deliverance, "the female of the Scolia is seized by the male, who does not even give her time to wash her eyes." Having slept over a year underground, the Sitares, barely rid of their mummy-cases, taste, in the sunlight, a few minutes of love, on the very site of their re-birth; then they die. Life surges, burns, flares, sparkles, rushes "in a perpetual tide," a brief radiance between two nights. A world of a myriad fairies fills the rustling forest: day and night it unfolds a thousand marvellous pictures; about the root of a bramble, in the shadow of an old wall, on a slope of loose soil, or in the dense thickets.