Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/304

Rh picturing the "unpaid minstrel to wayfaring men" as "sitting upon lofty trees, warmed with the great heat of summer, sipping the dew that is like woman’s milk;"—and the dainty fragment of Meleager, beginning:—"Thou vocal tettix, drunk with drops of dew, sitting with thy serrated limbs upon the tops of petals, thou givest out the melody of the lyre from thy dusky skin."………Or take the charming address of Evenus to a nightingale:—

"Thou Attic maiden honey-fed, hast chirping seized a chirping cicada, and bearest it to thy unfledged young,—thou, a twitterer, the twitterer,—thou, the winged, the well-winged,—thou, a stranger, the stranger,—thou, a summer-child,, the summer-child! Wilt thou not quickly cast it from thee? For it is not right, it is not just, that those engaged in song should perish by the mouths of those engaged in song."

On the other band, we find Japanese poets much more inclined to praise the voices of night-crickets than those of semi. There are countless poems about semi, but very few which commend their singing. Of course the semi are very different from the cicadae 註