“The fragrance 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, the winged 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.