ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

JOHN KEATS

THE poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the grasshopper's he takes the lead

In summer luxury he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Two friends were once spending an evening with Leigh Hunt, editor of a London paper. One of these friends was young John Keats, then just twenty-one and a student in St. Thomas Hospital. In the course of the evening the conversation fell upon "that reverend denizen of the hearth," the cricket. In a bantering mood "Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing then and there and to time a sonnet on the grasshopper and the cricket." The two sonnets are printed here. Keats finished first.

If you were to judge the two poems, which would you choose as the most pleasing? With what arguments would you support your choice?

TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

LEIGH HUNT

GREEN little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth

To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song

Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.

I MEANT TO DO MY WORK TODAY

1

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

I MEANT to do my work today,

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out its shining hand

So what could I do but laugh and go?

THE BUILDING OF A SPIDER'S WEB1

JEAN HENRI FABRE

THE smallest garden contains the garden spiders, all clever

weavers.

Let us go every evening, step by step, from one border of tall rosemaries to the next. Should things move too slowly, we will sit down at the foot of the shrubs, where the light falls favorably, and watch with unwearying attention. Let us give ourselves a title, "Inspector of Spiders' Webs!" There are not many people in that profession, and we shan't make any money by it; but never mind, we shall learn some very interesting things. The spiders I watch are young ones, much slenderer than they will be in the late autumn. They work by day, work even in the sun, whereas the old ones weave only at night. Work starts in July, a couple of hours before sunset.

The spinstresses of my inclosures then leave their daytime hiding-places, choose their posts and begin to spin, one here, another there. There are many of them; we can choose where we please. Let us stop in front of this one, whom we surprise in the act of laying the foundations of her web. She runs about the rosemary hedge, from the tip of one branch to another, within the limits of some eighteen inches. Gradually she puts a thread in position, drawing it from her body with the combs attached to her hind legs. She comes and goes impetuously, as though at random; she goes up, comes down, goes up again, dives down again, and each time strengthens the points of contact with threads distributed here and there. The result is a sort of frame. The shapeless structure is what she wishes; it marks out a flat, free, and perpendicular space. This is all that is

necessary.

1 From Insect Adventures by Jean Henri Fabre, copyrighted by Dodd, Mead and Company. Used by permission.

A special thread, the foundation of the stronger net which will be built later, is stretched across the area of the other. It can be told from the others by its isolation, its position at a distance from any twig that might interfere with its swaying length. It never fails to have, in the middle, a thick white point, formed of a little silk cushion.

The time has come to weave the hunting snare. The spider starts from the center, which bears the white signpost, and, running along the cross-thread, hurriedly reaches the circumference, that is to say, the irregular frame inclosing the free space. Still with the same sudden movement, she rushes from the outside to the center; she starts again backwards and forwards, makes for the right, the left, the top, the bottom. She hoists herself up, dives down, climbs up again, runs down and always returns to the central landmark by roads that slant in the most unexpected manner. Each time a radius or spoke is laid, here, there, or elsewhere, in what looks like mad disorder.

Anyone looking at the finished web, so neat and regular in appearance, would think that the spider laid the spokes in an orderly fashion, one after the other. She does nothing of the sort, but she knows what she is about, all the same. After setting a few spokes in one direction, the spider runs across to the other side to draw some in the opposite direction. These sudden changes have a reason; they show us how clever the spider is in her business. If she began by laying all the spokes on one side, she would pull the web out of shape or even destroy it. She must put some on the other side to balance. She is a past mistress of the secrets of rope building, without serving an apprenticeship.

One would think that this interrupted and apparently disordered labor must result in a confused piece of work. Wrong: the rays are equidistant and form a beautifully regular circle. Their number is a characteristic mark of the different species. The Angular Epeira places twenty-one in her web, the Banded

Epeira thirty-two, the Silky Epeira forty-two. These numbers are not absolutely fixed, but the variation is very slight.

Now which of us would undertake, offhand, without much preliminary experiment and without measuring instruments, to divide a circle into a given quantity of sectors or parts of equal width? The garden spider, though weighted with a wallet and tottering on threads shaken by the wind, performs the delicate division without stopping to think. She achieves it by a method which seems mad according to our notions of geometry. Out of disorder she brings order. We are amazed at the result obtained. How does this spider come to succeed with her difficult problem, so strangely managed? I am still asking myself the question.

The spider takes Stationed on this She is engaged on a

The laying of the radii or spokes is finished. her place in the center, on the little cushion. support, she slowly turns round and round. delicate piece of work. With an extremely thin thread, she describes from spoke to spoke, starting from the center, a spiral line with very close coils. This is the center of the web. I will call it the resting-floor.

The thread now becomes thicker. The first could hardly be seen; the second is plainly visible. The spider shifts her position with great slanting strides, turns a few times, moving farther and farther from the center, fixes her line each time to the spoke which she crosses, and at last comes to a stop at the lower edge of the frame. She has described a spiral with coils of rapidly increasing width. The average distance between the coils, even in the webs of the young spiders, is about one third of an inch.

All this is but a support for the snaring-web. Clinging on the one hand to the radii, on the other to the crossbars, the spider covers the same ground as when laying the first spiral, but in the opposite direction; formerly, she moved away from the center; now she moves towards it and with closer and more numerous