WINDOWS, CONSIDERED FROM INSIDE.

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HE other day, a butterfly came into our room, and began beating himself against the upper panes of a window half open, thinking to get It is a nice point, relieving your butterfly; he is a creature so delicate! If you handle him without ceremony, you bring away on your fingers something which you take to be down, but which is plumes of feathers; and as there are no fairies at hand, two atoms high, to make pens of the quills, and write “articles” on the invisible, there would be a loss. Mr. Bentham's ghost would visit us, shaking his venerable locks at such unnecessary-pain-producing and reasonable-pleasure-preventing heedlessness. Then, if you brush him downwards, you stand a chance of hurting his antennæ, or feelers, and of not knowing what mischief you may do to his eyes, or his sense of touch, or his instruments of dialogue; for some philosophers hold that insects talk with their feelers, as dumb people do with their fingers. However, some suffering must be hazarded in order to prevent worse, even to the least and most delicate of Heaven's creatures, who would not know pleasure if they did not know pain; and perhaps, the merrier and happier they

are in general, the greater the lumps of pain they can bear. Besides, all must have their share, or how would the burden of the great blockish necessity be equally distributed? and, finally, what business had little Papilio to come into a place unfit for him, and get bothering himself with glass? Oh, faith!— your butterfly must learn experience, as well as your Bonaparte.

There was he, beating, fluttering, flouncing, -wondering that he could not get through so clear a matter (for so glass appears to be to insects, as well as to men), and tearing his silken little soul out with ineffectual energy. What plumage he must have left upon the pane! what feathers and colors, strewed about, as if some fine lady had gone mad against a ball-room door for not being let in!

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But we had a higher simile for him than that. Truly," thought we, "little friend, thou art like some of the great German transcendentalists, who, in thinking to reach at heaven by an impossible way (such at least it seemeth at present), run the hazard of cracking their brains, and spoiling their wings for ever; whereas, if thou and they would but stoop a little lower, and begin with earth first, there, before thee, lieth open heaven as well as earth; and thou mayest mount high as thou wilt, after thy own happy fashion, thinking less, and enjoying all things."

And hereupon we contrived to get him downwards; and forth, out into the air, sprang he, - first against the lime-trees, and then over them into the blue ether, as if he had resolved to put our advice into prac

tice.

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We have before spoken of the fret and fury into which the common fly seems to put himself against a window. Bees appear to take it more patiently, out of a greater knowledge; and slip about with a strange air of hopelessness. They seem to "give it up." These things, as Mr. Pepys said of the humanities at court, "it is pretty to observe." Glass itself is a phenomenon that might alone serve a reflecting observer with meditation for a whole morning, so substantial, and yet so air-like; so close and compact to keep away the cold, yet so transparent and facile to let in light, the gentlest of all things; so palpably something, and yet to the eye and the perceptions a kind of nothing! It seems absolutely to deceive insects in this respect; which is remarkable, considering how closely they handle it, and what microscopic eyes we suppose them to have. We should doubt (as we used to do) whether we did not mistake their ideas on the subject, if we had not so often seen their repeated dashings of themselves against the panes, their stoppings (as if to take breath), and then their recommencement of the same violence. It is difficult to suppose that they do this for mere pleasure; for it looks as if they must hurt themselves. Observe in particular the tremendous thumps given himself by that great hulking fellow of a fly, that Ajax of the Diptera, the blue-bottle. Yet in autumn, in their old age, flies congregate in windows as elsewhere, and will take the matter so quietly as sometimes to stand still for hours together. We suppose they love the warmth, or the light; and that either they have found out the secret as to the rest, or

"Years have brought the philosophic mind."

Why should Fly plague himself any longer with household matters which he cannot alter? He has tried hard in his time; and now he resigns himself like a wise insect, and will taste whatsoever tranquil pleasures remain for him, without beating his brains or losing his temper any longer. In natural livers, pleasure survives pain. Even the artificial, who keep up their troubles so long by pride, self-will, and the want of stimulants, contrive to get more pleasure than is supposed out of pain itself, especially by means of thinking themselves ill used and of grumbling. If the heart (for want of better training) does not much keep up its action with them, the spleen does; and so there is action of some sort: and, whenever there is action, there is life; and life is found to have something valuable in it for its own sake, apart from ordinary considerations either of pain or pleasure. But your fly and your philosopher are for pleasure too, to the last, if it be harmless. Give old Musca a grain of sugar, and see how he will put down his proboscis to it, and dot and pound, and suck it in, and be as happy as an old West-India gentleman pondering on his sugar-cane, and extracting a pleasure out of some dulcet recollection!

Gamblers, for want of a sensation, have been known to start up from their wine, and lay a bet upon two raindrops coming down a pane of glass. How poor are those gentry, even when they win, compared with observers whose resources need never fail them! To the latter, if they please, the raindrop itself is a world,

a world of beauty and mystery and aboriginal idea, bringing before them a thousand images of proportion

and reflection, and the elements, and light and color, and roundness and delicacy and fluency, and beneficence, and the refreshed flowers, and the growing corn, and dewdrops on the bushes, and the tears that fall from gentle eyes, and the ocean, and the rainbow, and the origin of all things. In water, we behold one of the old primeval mysteries of which the world was made. Thus the commonest raindrop on a pane of glass becomes a visitor from the solitudes of time.

A window, to those who have read a little in Nature's school, thus becomes a book or a picture, on which her genius may be studied, handicraft though the canvas be, and little as the glazier may have thought of it. Not that we are to predicate ignorance of your glazier now-a-days, any more than of other classes that compose the various readers of penny and three-half-penny philosophy,cheap visitor, like the sunbeams, of houses of all sorts. The glazier could probably give many a richer man information respecting his glass, and his diamond, and his putty (no anticlimax in these analytical days), and let him into a secret or two, besides, respecting the amusement to be derived from it. (We have just got up from our work to inform ourselves of the nature and properties of the said mystery, putty; and should blush for the confession, if the blush would not imply that a similar ignorance were less common with us than it is.)

But a window is a frame for other pictures besides its own; sometimes for moving ones, as in the instance of a cloud going along, or a bird, or a flash of lightning; sometimes for the distant landscape, sometimes