Here were no fewer than six
unbeautiful creatures, brothers and sisters, hatched from eggs on which
their parent earwig sat incubating just like an eagle or dove or
swallow, or, better still, like a pelican; for in the end did she not
give of her own life-fluid to nourish her children? Unbeautiful, yet not
without a glory superior to that of the Purple Emperor, and the angelic
blue Morpho, and the broad-winged Ornithoptera, that caused an
illustrious traveller to swoon with joy at the sight of its supreme
loveliness. Du Maurier has a drawing of a little girl in a garden gazing
at two earwigs racing along a stem. "I suppose," she remarks
interrogatively to her mamma, "that these are Mr. and Mrs. Earwig?" and
on being answered affirmatively, exclaims, "What could they have seen in
each other?" What they saw was blue blood, or something in insectology
corresponding to it. The earwig's lustre is that of antiquity. He
existed on earth before colour came in; and colour is old, although not
so old as Nature's unconscious aestheticism which, in the organic world,
is first expressed in beauty of form. It is long since the great May
flies, large as swifts, had their aerial cloudy dances over the vast
everglades and ancient forests of ferns; and when, on some dark night, a
brilliant Will-o'-the-wisp rose and floated above the feathery foliage,
drawn in myriads to its light, they revolved about it in an immense
mystical wheel, misty-white, glistening, and touched with prismatic
colour.
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