likely enough to spell for him. They are two Latin hexameters:—
Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in ævum.
(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death:
This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)
Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza is another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last, Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,—
"I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell and of Death." And in His servant St. John's description of Him—
"Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth."
All this assuredly, so far as the young child, consecrated like David, the youngest of his brethren, conceived his own new life in Earth and Heaven,—he understood already in the Lion symbol. But of all this I had no thought[1] when I chose the prayer of
- ↑ The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was added to my second lecture (I age 54), in correcting the press, mistakenly put into the text instead of the notes.
