learn her wisdom, they heard an ancient tale concerning the mysterious Phœnix, that came once in five hundred years from the far-off land of spices and perfume to the sacred City of the Sun, where he constructed for himself a funeral pile and perished in the flames, but only to rise again in renewed life and splendour; then, spreading his radiant wings, he took his flight to the distant land from whence he came. What special truth this allegory veiled in the minds of those who told it we can only guess; at the same time it may serve us well as a type of the old 'wisdom' itself,[1] which did not perish with its primeval seat, but sprang into renewed and glorious existence in what, to us, is 'ancient' Greece—then, lost again when Greece was lost, revived once more in our latter days.
But Pa-Ra had a special claim to the veneration of the Egyptians as the birthplace of their sacred literature. Here were written, or, as the priests called it, 'found,' the original
- ↑ This comparison of the ancient 'wisdom' to the phœnix is taken from Reginald Stuart Poole's Cities of Egypt,—an interesting and suggestive book, to which I have been more than once indebted, and especially in the above description of On.
