“Why does that brother come with empty hands? In his tongue he brought a _Hail!_ to my ears; in his hands he brought nothing to my eyes. Thou who art seated at a dividing of the ways [Corbie], why hast thou demanded nothing certain of him who dwelleth in Maresa? The crows fly about the roofs of the houses and cry out; and the dove, nourished on the pavements of the church, is silent. I should have trusted that dove had he said anything about the eagle [Leo III] which lately deserted the roofs of the citadel of Rome to drink at the fountains of the Saxon land [the Pope had come to Paderborn] to see the lion [Karl]; or if our blackbird, flying between them, had demanded of the monastic cock [Adalhard] who rouses the brethren to their matin watch, that by means of him the sparrow [Alcuin] sitting alone upon the house top might know what is the convention between the lion and the eagle; and if the youth of the eagle, as the psalmist prophesies, is renewed[237] to pristine gladness; and if new dwellings grow up in the marshes of perfidy that were cleansed[238]; and if the lion, in pursuit of the ibex, meditates crossing the heights of the Alps. “The sparrow hath his ears open. But I see that the proverbial wolf [this is said to mean the devil] in the fable[239] has taken away the cock’s voice; lest it happen that if he crowed, the apostolic denial[240] should be renewed in the city of his former power, and the last error be worse than the first. “Why has love sinned, which has not seen _Vale_ [fare thee well] written, while I hear that the partridges [messengers], running across the fields, have come to the dwelling [Corbie] of the cock. Perfect love driveth away fear. Perfect love with the sparkling pupils of the eyes sees everything, and with the clear intuition of piety will always find a fixed rule of wholesome counsel. It would seem that the cock is turned into a cuckoo, which is silent when the sun ascends into the summer constellation of the crab, while the nest-making sparrow at every season alike twitters on the smoky roofs.[241] “That sparrow now in this September month flies to revisit his beloved nest[242], that he may feed his young[243], gaping with hungry beaks, with little grains of piety: desiring that some time on the banks of this river Loire, rich in fish, he may hear the voice of the cock sounding forth the _Vale_, and that he who with flapping of his wings rouses himself to matutinal melodies may come and exhort the sparrow in the midst of his young.” At this point the letter changes its character, and we need not follow it further. [Sidenote: Ep. 16. A.D. 790.]