scope.  I dwell on this before passing on to the poem, because I want to bring before you the remembrance of what a tremendous factor in literature, as in thought and in the whole of life is the principle of comparison, or, as we might put it, the principle of similitude or likeness.  We learn about a thing we do not know through its likeness, as a whole or in some parts, to a thing we do know.  Our little children can understand most easily something of the love of Our Father who is in Heaven through the love of their father on earth:  they learn of their Redeemer’s Mother, their own dear Mother of Grace, through their earthly mother, who is ever ready to supply their wants and give them joy and comfort.

In devotion what do we most need to pray for?  Is it not for likeness to the holy ones and to the holiest of all creatures, Our Lady; and highest of all, to the Lord, Our Saviour and Example?  And is it not the fairest of promises that one day “we shall be like to Him, for we shall see Him as He is”? (St John iii.)

So in literature we have, springing from this principle of comparison, the forms fable, parable, and allegory; and in language the figures of speech which we know as simile and metaphor.

Ovid, a Roman poet who lived before the Incarnation, tells the old Eastern fable thus: 

“There is a bird that restores and reproduces itself; the Assyrians call it the Phoenix.  It feeds on no common food, but on the choicest of gums and spices; and after a life of secular length (i.e., a hundred years) it builds in a high tree with cassia, spikenard, cinnamon, and myrrh, and on this nest it expires in sweetest odours.  A young Phoenix rises and grows, and when strong enough it takes up the nest with its deposit and bears it to the City of the Sun, and lays it down there in front of the sacred portals.”

It was a much later and a much longer version of the story that our English poet was debtor to.  It was written in Latin by Lactantius, and the fable there, Professor Earle says, “is so curiously and, as it were, significantly elaborated, that we hardly know whether we are reading a Christian allegory or no.”

He goes on to say that Allegory has always been a favourite form with Christian writers, and finds more than one reason for it.  There was a tendency towards symbolism in literature outside Christianity when the Christian literature arose.  Another reason was that the early Christians used it to convey what it would probably have endangered their lives to set in plain words; besides this—­here I must give the Professor’s own beautiful words—­“Christian thought had in its own nature something which invited allegory, partly by its own hidden sympathies with nature, and partly by its very immensity, for which all direct speech was felt to be inadequate.”  One more reason he suggests, and that is “the all-pervading and unspeakable sweetness of Christ’s teaching by parables.”