[The essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry D. Thoreau, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, and John Burroughs, are used by permission of, and by arrangement with, The Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of their works. The essays by George William Curtis and by William Dean Howells are used by permission of Harper and Brothers. The essays by William Crary Brownell, Edward Sanford Martin, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Theodore Roosevelt are printed by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, the essay by Charles William Eliot by permission of The Century Company, and that by Henry James by permission of The Macmillan Company.] THE EPHEMERA: AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE TO MADAME BRILLON, OF PASSY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a _moscheto_; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly harmony.