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THE PHOENIX BIRD |
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through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table s*nell doubly sweet.
But the Phoenix is not the bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the icy plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fahlun and in England's coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymn-book that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindoo maid gleams bright when she beholds him.
The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him ? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song ! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine ; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan's red beak ; on Shakespeare's shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin's raven, and whispered in his ear ' Immortality ! ' and at the minstrels' feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.
The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him ? He sang to thee the Marseillaise, and thou kissedst the feather that fell from his wing ; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance thou didst turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.
The Bird of Paradise—renewed each century—born in flame, ending in flame ! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth—' The Phoenix of Arabia.'
In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee—thy name, Poetry. |
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