"Sweet infant, whom thy brooding parents love For what thou art, and what they hope to see thee, Unhallow'd sprites, and earth-born phantoms flee thee; Thy soft simplicity, a hovering dove, That still keeps watch from blight and bane to free thee, With its weak wings, in peaceful care outspread, Fanning invisibly thy pillow'd head, Strikes evil powers with reverential dread, Beyond the sulphurous bolts of fabled Jove, Or whatsoe'er of amulet or charm Fond ignorance devised to save poor souls from harm." Perhaps the sweetest touch of childhood in all Latin literature is that charming passage in Horace (_Carm._ Lib. III. 4):-- "Me fabulosæ Vulture in Apulo, Nutrices extra limen Apuliæ, Ludo fatigatoque somno Fronde nova puerum palumbes Texere," which Milman thus translates:-- "The vagrant infant on Mount Vultur's side, Beyond my childhood's nurse, Apulia's bounds, By play fatigued and sleep, Did the poetic doves With young leaves cover." The amativeness of the dove has lent much to the figurative language of that second golden age, that other Eden where love is over all. Shenstone, in his beautiful pastoral, says:-- "I have found out a gift for my fair; I have found where the wood-pigeons breed," and the "love of the turtle," "billing and cooing," are now transferred to human affection. Venus, the goddess of love, and the boy-god Cupid ride in a chariot drawn by doves, which birds were sacred to the sea-born child of Uranus. In the springtime, when "the voice of the turtle is heard in the land," then "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." If, from the sacred oaks of Dodona, to the first Greeks, the doves disclosed the oracles of Jove, so has "the moan of doves in immemorial elms" divulged to generation after generation of lovers the mission of his son of the bow and quiver. _Robin._ What the wood-pigeon was to Horace, the robin-redbreast has been to the children of old England. In the celebrated ballad of the "Children in the Wood", we are told that, after their murder by the cruel uncle,-- "No burial these pretty babes Of any man receives, Till Robin Redbreast piously Did cover them with leaves." The poet Thomson speaks of "the redbreast sacred to the household gods," and Gray, in a stanza which, since the edition of 1753, has been omitted from the _Elegy_, wrote:-- "There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are frequent violets found; The robin loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground." Dr. Robert Fletcher (447) has shown to what extent the redbreast figures in early English poetry, and the belief in his pious care for the dead and for children is found in Germany, Brittany, and other parts of the continent of Europe. In England the robin is the children's favourite bird, and rhymes and stories in his honour abound,--most famous is the nursery song, "Who killed Cock Robin?"