We excused ourselves by saying that this insect, which lives six years in a single night, could have spread its wings beneath the sky but two months longer,--just long enough to perpetuate its race. We deprived it, therefore, of a very little time--a month out of six or seven years. Yes; but that month was the epoch to which all its life had tended. Previously it had only vegetated; but then, it could really have lived and reigned, powerful and joyous. Long an insect, in that hour it would have become almost a bird, a son of the flower-enamelled earth and the genial light. We had acted like the Parcæ, which delight in cutting the thread of our lives at the very moment of happiness! [Illustration] [Illustration: III.--WORLD-BUILDERS.] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. WORLD-BUILDERS. There is a world under this world, above, below, and all around it, of which we have no suspicion. Occasionally, indeed, we catch a faint murmur, a sound, and thereupon we say, "It is a trifle, it is nothing." But this nothing is the Infinite. The Infinite of the invisible life, the silent life, the world of night and of the inner earth, of the shadowy ocean,--the unseen creatures of the air which we breathe, or which, mingling in the fluids we drink, circulate within us unperceived. An immensely powerful world, which in its details we scorn, but which at intervals affrights us, when it stands revealed before our eyes in one of its grand unforeseen manifestations. The navigator, for example, who at night sees the ocean shimmering with lustre and wreathing garlands of fire, is at first diverted by the spectacle. He sails ten leagues; the garland is indefinitely prolonged; it stirs, and twists, and knots itself in harmony with the motions of the wave; it becomes a monstrous serpent ever extending its sinuous length to thirty, ay, and forty leagues. Yet all this is but a dance of imperceptible animalcules! What are their numbers? At this question the imagination starts back aghast; it perceives in the distance a nature of gigantic force, of terrific wealth, but possessing little relation to the other, the well-ordered, and, in a certain degree, economical nature, of the higher life.