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The Life of the Bee

Let us go on, then, with the story of our hive; let us take it up where we left it; and raise, as high as we may, a fold of the festooned curtain in whose midst a strange sweat, white as snow and airier than the down of a wing, is beginning to break over the swarm. For the wax that is now being born is not like the wax that we know; it is immaculate, it has no weight; seeming truly to be the soul of the honey, that itself is the spirit of flowers. And this motionless incantation has called it forth that it may serve us, later—in memory of its origin, doubtless, wherein it is one with the azure sky, and heavy with perfumes of magnificence and purity—as the fragrant light of the last of our altars. 180