FAIRY TALES OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN THE PHOENIX BIRD

                                       1872

                     FAIRY TALES OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

                                THE PHOENIX BIRD

                           by Hans Christian Andersen

    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 END