You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy
day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I
stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the
company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little
fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told,
were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living
company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation.
You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great
application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the
little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened
through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as
they in their natural vivacity spoke three, or four together, I could
make but little of their conversation. I found however by some broken
expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on
the merit of two foreign musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a
_moscheto_; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as
regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living
a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise,
just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to
complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and
imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old
gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to
himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in
hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the
most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly
harmony.
"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race
who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world,
the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours;
and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the
apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature,
and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the
ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be
extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in
cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and
destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no
less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends
of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them;
for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect
to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my
toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot
live to enjoy? What the political struggles I have been engaged in for
the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my
philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general? for in
politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of
ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of
other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in
philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is
short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I
shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to
nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no
longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth
hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to
its end, and be buried in universal ruin?"
To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but
the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible
conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind
smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.