"The leader of the butterflies," from St. Nicholas magazine, 1908.

"That night when slumber closed her eyes," from Fairy Mary's Dream, written and illustrated by A. F. L., 1870.

"The fairy lake," from Little Loving-Hearts Poem-Book by Margaret Elenora Tupper, 1882.

From Fancies Free by E. L. Shute, 1892.

An illustration from Sing Song: A Nursery Rrhyme Book by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1893).

Before "snail mail" there was "butterfly mail," as we see in the sixth season of Bewitched.

These cruel insects (butterfly fairies?) are killing a wasp in Punch, 1865.

"A natural enmity, attacking and tearing each other with the cruelty of insects." —Graphis: Volume 8 (1958)

You can guess where we're going with this one.  What if Alice and the Wonderland caterpillar had found romance?  Arthur's Home Magazine wondered the same thing (not really) in the same year that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An illustration from an 1898 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

An illustration from an 1898 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Eats a butterfly."

Vladimir Nabokov: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."  (via SocialFiction)

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: