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. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and 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. He wings his way in the glimmer of the northern lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.īut the Phœnix is not the bird of Arabia alone. When a mother sits by her infant’s cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant’s head. The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in colour, charming in song. The fable tells us that he dwells in Arabia, and that every year he burns himself to death in his nest but each time a new Phœnix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg. The bird perished in the flames but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one-the one solitary Phœnix bird.

Here, in the first rose, a bird was born: his flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing.īut when Eve plucked the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush.

Phoenix bird meaning