Forlong - Rivers of Life

82
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
thunder and lightning, which has a double meaning in regard to the gods these
powers represent. Virgil's motller, Mais gave birth to a Laurel, and from Virgil’s
ashes sprang another, which still grows over his tomb. The Bay signifies the revivification
of life, for the Sun, when the Bay is bright and green, is then breaking through
the portals of his wintry tomb, and the Laurel, like him, revives from its own roots
when thought to be dead; at least, so it was said. Whoever chewed. its leaves could
prophesy, and Greece called a class of diviners Daphnephagi, for did not loved Daphne
—the daughter of Perseus—of whose suggestive name I shall have much. to say
hereafter, fly from Apollo’s embraces, and calling on her parent stream to save her, the
River answered her plaint, and turned her into a laurel, as we see in that exquisite
marble group now in Rome.
Apollo, as the vernal Sun, is ushered in wreathed in the Laurel, and his birth
like that of all, gods and men, is from a Cave, or “garden,” said our nurses. This
description of his re-entrance to glory, in Dodd’s Callimachus, 1 is very beautiful, and
gives us much concerning trees, and also, probably, the origin of the idea of Christ
visiting Hades, or rather Ades, or the West, and knocking at “the brazen gates,” of
which the Gospel of Nicodemus (so called Apocryphal, but scarcely more so than other
canonical ones) gives us full details.
“ See how the laurel’s hallowed branches wave,
Hark, sounds tumultuous shake the trembling Cave !
Far, ye profane, be off! with beauteous feet
Bright Phebus comes, and thunders at the gate;
See the glad sign the Delian palm hath given;
Sudden it bends; and hovering in the heav’n,
Soft sings the Swan with melody divine;
Burst ope, ye bars, ye gates, your heads decline;
Decline your heads, ye sacred doors, expand:
He comes, the God of Light, the God’s at hand!”
The Swan is, as most classical readers are aware, a sign of coming day—bright-
ness, or whiteness, often also of snow, as some say; because, as it melts away, nature
begins to live, and the poet here seems to mean this in saying, “it sings,” or awakens
melody in the groves. As this poem belongs to the third century B.C., the pious
author seems to have been at one with Isaiah, when he speaks of “the beautiful feet of
him who brings the good tidings” (lii. 7); with Malachi, where he says, “Unto you
shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings” (iv. 2), and with the
writer of Ps. xix., who says the sun cometh “as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and
rejoiceth as a strong rnan to run a race.” None of these writers had the faintest conception
of the mean ing which the Christian Churehes put on such passages; and. all
had alike the same conception of “the Sun,” “the Lord of Hosts,” of Palms, Caves,
and the portals which “the Thunderer” was to open at his vernal appearing, on a. lost
or winter-stricken earth.
1 W. Dodd’s Trans., Lond. 1755.