Here it may be remarked that all the most {124} beautiful living things, from insect to man, like all the highest productions of human genius, produce in us a sense of the supernatural. If any reader should say in his heart that I am wrong, that it is not so, that he experiences no such feeling, I can but remind him that not all men possess all human senses and faculties. Some of us--many of us--lack this or that sense which others have. I have even met a man who was without the sense of humour. In the case of our "worm," unbeautiful in itself, yet the begetter of so great a beauty, the sense of something outside of nature which shines on us through nature, even as the sun shines in the stained glass of a church window, is more distinctly felt than in the case of any other insect in our country, because of the rarity of such a phenomenon. It is, with us, unique; but many of us know the winged luminous insects of other lands. Both are beautiful, both mysterious--the winged and the wingless; but one light differs from another in glory even as the stars. The fire-fly is more splendid, more surprising, in its flashes. It flashes and is dark, and we watch, staring at the black darkness, for the succeeding flash. It is like watching for rockets to explode in the dark sky: there is an element of impatience which interferes with the pleasure. To admire and have a perfect satisfaction, the insects must be in numbers, in multitudes, sparkling everywhere in the darkness, so that no regard is paid to any individual light, but they are seen as we see snowflakes. [Sidenote: Glow-worm and firefly] I fancy that Dante, in describing the appearance of {125} glorified souls in heaven, unless he took it all from Ezekiel, had the fire-fly in his mind: From the bosom Of that effulgence quivers a sharp flash, Sudden and frequent in the guise of lightning. Of all who have attempted to describe and compare the two insects--fire-fly and glow-worm--Thomas Lovell Beddoes is the best. Beddoes himself, in those sudden brilliant letters to his friend Kelsall, of Fareham, in this county, was a sort of human fire-fly. In a letter to Procter, from Milan, 1824, he wrote: