inferred from the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas; ignorance being mere privation, by which nothing can be produced-a vacuity, in which the soul sits. motionless and torpid for want of attraction. "Riches are Power," says the economist ;-and is not Intellect? asks Mr. Disraeli's philosopher, who yet is impelled to inquire how it is that, while the influence of the millionaire is instantly felt in all classes of society, "noble mind" so often leaves its possessor unknown and unhonoured. Is it because he has thought only of himself, and, a constant and laborious student of his own exalted nature, has forgotten or disdained the study of all others? It is, observes Mr. Hamilton Aïde, the use we make of knowledge, in maturing our judgment and reflection, that is power, and not knowledge itself, if we cannot turn it to account; for many learned men have been but poor thinkers and reasoners. So Hartley Coleridge agrees that knowledge is power where in the possession of a powerful mind; for with such, truths old as the creation are original: but it is no compliment to a man to be called a walking encyclopædia. Far too little considered in the present day, urges Dr. John Brown, is the means of turning knowledge to action, "making it what Bacon meant when he said it was power," invigorating the thinking substance-giving tone, and what he would call muscle and nerve, blood and bone, to the mind; a firm gripe, and a keen and sure eye.-But a farther examination of the disputed maxim would take us too far-in a direction not indeed altogether away from our starting-point, yet sufficiently apart from it to give us pause.

Backing then, from that by-path to the main road whence we started, we come again upon, and take a parting glance accordingly at, the Tree of Knowledge and its fatal fruit-this time through a medium of French verse, that of France's most classical poet, satirist, and critic. Boileau versifies in sonorous rhythm the temptation of Adam "par l'éclat trompeur d'une funeste pomme," and stigmatizes the tempter who

"fit croire au premier homme

Qu'il allait, en goûtant de ce morceau fatal,

Comblé de tout savoir, à Dieu se rendre égal.
Il en fit sur-le-champ la folle expérience.
Mais tout ce qu'il acquit de nouvelle science
Fut que, triste et honteux de voir sa nudité,
Il sut qu'il n'était plus, grâce à sa vanité,
Qu'un chétif animal pétri d'un peu de terre,
A qui la faim, la soif, partout faisaient la guerre,
Et qui, courant toujours de malheur en malheur,
A la mort arrivait enfin par la douleur."

II.

THE DOVE'S FLIGHT FROM THE ARK; SEEKING REST AND FINDING NONE.

TH

GENESIS viii. 9.

'HE dove that Noah put forth from the ark at the end of forty days, took flight, we may be sure, with entire willingness to leave her prison-refuge, and with gladsome longing to find in a new world fresh woods and pastures new. "But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him in the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth." Another week, and the dove might find a green leaf on a topmost bough, if not a bough itself to rest on. Yet another week, and the dove might find lasting rest for the sole of her foot, and so be seen no more by her still floating friends. But our present concern is (unless in the footnotes) with the first and fruitless flight from the ark, when

*

* Bellarmine and the Rabbis say that the dove plucked the leaf which she brought to Noah from the Garden of Eden, which was too loftily situated to be reached by the flood. To this tradition Jean Paul Richter alludes, in one of his novellets, where he likens our internal joy to an oliveleaf, brought to us by a dove over the foaming deluge that is spread around us, and gathered by her in the far sunny Paradise high above the flood.

One in whom Wordsworth hailed an "ingenuous poet," of "true sensibility," little known to most of us by name, John Edwards, compares the blue-eyed Spring, that met him with her blossoms, to "the Dove of old,

she beat about on that waste of waters, seeking rest and finding

none.

"Of rest was Noah's dove bereft

When with impatient wings she left

That safe retreat, the ark;

returned with olive leaf, to cheer the Patriarch mourning o'er a world destroy'd." And Wordsworth has himself a sonnet beginning

"Near Anio's stream I spied a gentle Dove

Perch'd on an olive-branch, and heard her cooing
'Mid new-born blossoms that soft airs were wooing,
While all things present told of joy and love.
But restless fancy left that olive grove
To hail the exploratory bird renewing

Hope for the few, who, at the world's undoing,

On the great flood were spared to live and move.

O bounteous Heaven! signs true as dove and bough

Brought to the ark are coming evermore,

Given though we seek them not, but, while we plough

This sea of life without a visible shore,

Do neither promise ask nor grace implore

In what alone is ours, the living Now."

In a lighter vein, yet sad-hearted au fond, writes Arthur Clough's Claude to Eustace about Luther bringing back Theology once again in a flood upon Europe; and the dove and the leaf are made to do service in the description,-which things are an allegory:

"Lo you, for forty days from the windows of heaven it fell, the
Waters prevail on the earth yet more for a hundred and fifty;
Are they abating at last? the doves that are sent to explore are
Wearily fain to return, at the best with a leaflet of promise,-
Fain to return, as they went, to the wandering wave-tost vessel,-
Fain to re-enter the roof of which covers the clean and the unclean."

Theology was here to A. H. Clough what Dogma is to his old Oxford friend and contemporary; and what the former thus hinted many years since in his hexametrical Amours de Voyage, the latter has expanded and elaborated into a treatise that may be said to have made a mark, as well as a noise, the book, namely, known and read by almost all men that read at all, or think even, and called Literature and Dogma.

One of Les Contemplations of France's most romantic poet of the romantic school compliments a brother penman on certain presentation volumes with this Biblical conceit :

"Et voilà qu'à travers ces brumes et ces eaux,
Tes volumes exquis m'arrivent, blancs oiseaux,
M'apportant le rameau qu'apportent les colombes
Aux arches."

Béranger made the Raven and the Dove his theme for a copy of verses that might be called the Two Voices; the Dove all hope and faith and

Giving her vain excursions o'er,

The disappointed bird once more

Explored the sacred bark."

So writes either Cowper or Cotton (suum cuique) in a fireside poem designed to show that the jewel of solid happiness lies within a man's own bosom," and they are fools who roam : "This world has nothing to bestow;

From our own selves our bliss must flow,

And that dear hut our home."

There is quoted in Mr. Davies' Pilgrimage of the Tiber a

charity, his black companion all cynicism and unbelief. And La Colombe et le Corbeau du Déluge ends with the dove's avowal,

"Je vais aux mortels malheureux

De l'olivier porter la branche

Que Dieu m'a fait cueillir pour eux.”

Whereat, as usual, the biped in black has a wicked laugh, l'oiseau noir se prend à rire, and assures his innocent companion that the mortels he is about to rejoin will cook her with the wood of the olive-branch she is carrying to them.

How characteristically different the tone of Hartley Coleridge's application of the story, in his verses entitled Religious Differences, where even the raven comes in for a good word, a kind one, at least, of compassionate sympathy-as though not, of necessity, so black as he is painted :

""Tis little that we know, and if befall

That faith do wander, like the restless raven,
That rather chose without an aim to roam
O'er the blank world of waters, than to seek
In the one sacred ark a duteous home,
May good be with it! Yet the bird so meek,
The missive dove, that ne'er begrudged her pain,
But duly to the ark return'd again,

And brought at last the promise and the pledge
Of peace, hath won a dearer privilege," etc.

It might be permissible to put some such meaning on Victor Hugo's lines: "Dieu, qui tient dans sa main tous les oiseaux perdus,

Parfois au même nid rend la même colombe."

It is noteworthy among Mexican antiquities that tradition reports the boat in which Tezpi escaped the deluge to have been filled with various kinds of quadrupeds and birds; and that after some time a vulture was sent out of it, which remained feeding on the dead bodies of the giants, as the waters subsided; but a little humming-bird (huitzit-zilin), being sent forth, returned with a twig in its mouth.

versicle which critics have cited from his pages to show how living a thing poetry still is in Italy, for it is one of those charming "canti" an Italian peasant-girl thinks it nothing wonderful to produce; and putting our own interpretation upon it, for present purposes, we may imagine the patriarch addressing it to his dove:

"Vola, palomba, quanto pusi volare,
Salisei in alto quanto pusi salire,

Gira lo mondo quanto pusi girare,

Un giorno alle miei mani hai da venire !"

Mr. Watts' picture of the Return of the Dove has been admired for that suggestion of thought which shows what power is obtained over the imagination even by materials the most scanty: the eye rests on the solitary dove (that rests not), weary of wing, wending her way across the waste of waters to the far-off home in the ark, her only refuge; the artist awakens interest in the fate of the poor bird, for the gazer thinks of her long search from early morn to close of day; the dove is ready to drop into the sea that covers the earth, and there is no help in the silence and solitude.

"So, when the soul finds here no true content,
And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take,
She doth return from whence she first was sent,
And flies to him that first her wings did make."

The lines are by Sir John Davies, Shakspeare's contemporary,
and noted for his long philosophical poem On the Soul of Man
and the Immortality thereof. The soul's seeking rest and finding
none, the wide world over, is like Spenser's knight bound on a
bootless quest:
"He through the endless world did wander
wide, It seeking evermore, yet nowhere it descride;" not to
compare it with the more terrible experience of a station or
standing-point in Milton: Such resting found the sole of unblest
feet.

* “Fly, dove, as far as you can fly; mount as high as you can mount; wheel round the wide world as far as you can wheel; one day you will have to come to my hands."