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In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a
rose bush. 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. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of 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. The bird perished in the
flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new
one—the one solitary Phoenix bird. The fable tells that he dwells in
Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in
his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world,
rises up from the red egg.
The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color,
charming in song. 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. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings
sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell 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 plains of Lapland, and
hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath
the copper mountains of Fablun, and England's coal mines, he flies,
in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymnbook 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 Shakspeare's shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin's raven,
and whispered in the poet's 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 pen 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.
The Phoenix Bird
A Classic Children's Short Story
by
Hans Christian Andersen |
