What a quantity of old lore one might collect about the dove, and as for the allusions in ancient and modern literature they must be legion--from the familiar Scriptural phrase about the turtle to Chaucer’s ‘the wedded turtil with her heartë trewe,’ from Greek myth or Roman poem to Tennyson’s ‘moan of doves in immemorial elms.’ Doubtless much of the dove-lore is so well known that it would be superfluous to repeat it here. As the symbol of peace, of the Spirit, the dove herself is universally familiar. The turtle is also a symbol of mourning, and of old, as among the oak-groves of Dodona or before the fane of Hierapolis, was held sacred as the bird of prophecy, of the soul, and of the life after death. It is because of the loving faithfulness of the cushat that this bird was long ago dedicated to Venus; and it was because Venus presided over both birth and death that the dove became associated of old with scenes so opposite as marriage festivals and funeral rites. We are all familiar with the legend that the soul of a dying person may be seen departing like a flying dove, and so it was that even a tame pigeon came to be an unwelcome sight at the window where any one lay in serious illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid might take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird of the grave. The most singular of these folk-superstitions, I think, is that in whose exercise a living pigeon used to be placed on the head of a dying man in order to attract the pain to the bird and so ease the sufferer. One wonders what became of the unfortunate pigeon. The strangest of the northern legends is that Swedish one which makes the wild-dove the confidant of Baldur, the Scandinavian god of song and beautiful love, before he died ‘the white death’ when the ancient world receded for ever at the advent of Christ. Still do they murmur in the woods of the immortal passion, the deathless love of the old gods, they who long ago passed away one knows not whither, with Baldur going before them harping, and singing a strange song. One Gaelic poetic name for the cushat is poetry itself; _Caoirean-na-coille_, ‘the murmur of the woods.’ The subtlest legend is that old world Finnish identification of Aino the dove-maiden and Vaino, the male-Venus of the North, like Venus sea-born, like Venus the offspring of Zeus and Destiny, and as Aino or Vaino now the singer, now the presiding deity at marriage festival or during the lamentations for the dead.