s in colour,
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 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 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;
and 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.

[Illustration]

* * * * *

DALZIELS' FINE ART GIFT BOOKS.

One Guinea.

_In a Superb Binding, richly Illuminated in Red, Blue, and Gold, uniform
with "Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape."_

A ROUND OF DAYS.
DESCRIBED IN
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BY SOME OF
OUR MOST CELEBRATED POETS.
AND IN
SEVENTY PICTURES
BY
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*** Under the title of "A ROUND OF DAYS," is given a collection of
subjects from every-day life of the most varied charac