still more so when they became Christian; and their poetry is as much tinged with religion as with war. Whenever literature died down in England, it rose again in poetry; and the first poetry at each recovery was religious, or linked to religion. We shall soon see that the first poems were of war and religion. English Poetry was different then from what it is now. It was not written in rhyme, nor were its syllables counted. The lines are short; the beat of the verse depends on the emphasis given by the use of the same letter, except in the case of vowels, at the beginning of words; and the emphasis of the words depends on the thought. The lines are written in pairs; and in the best work the two chief words in the first and the one chief word in the second usually begin with the same letter. Here is one example from a war-song:

Wigu wintrum geong

Wordum mælde.'

'Warrior of winters young
With words spake.'

After the Norman Conquest there gradually crept in a French system of rhymes and of metres, which we find full-grown in Chaucer's works. But unrhymed and alliterative verse lasted in poetry to the reign of John, and alliteration was blended. with rhyme up to the sixteenth century. The latest form of it occurs in Scotland.

The greatest early Poems remaining are two-Beowulf and Cadmon's Paraphrase of the Bible. The first is on the whole a war story, the second is religious; and on these two subjects of war and religion English poetry for the most part speaks till the Conquest. Beowulf was brought into England from the Continent, and was rewritten in parts by a Christian Englishman of Northumbria. It is a story of the great deeds. and death of a hero named Beowulf. Its social interest lies in what it tells us of the manners and customs of these people before they came to the island; its poetical interest lies in its descriptions of wild nature, of the lives and feelings of the

men of that time, and of the way in which the Nature-worship of these men made dreadful and savage places seem dwelt in -as if the places had a spirit-by monstrous beings. For it was thus that all that half-natural, half-spiritual world began in English poetry which, when men grew gentler and the country more cultivated, became so beautiful as faeryland. Here is the description (taken from Thorpe's edition of the poem) of the dwelling-place of the Grendel, a man-fiend that devoured men, and whom Beowulf overcomes in battle:—

Hie dygel lond
warigeað wulf-hleóðu,
windige næssas,
frecne fen-gelád,
Sær fyrgen-stream,
under næssa genipu,
niper gewiteð,
flod under foldan.
Nis þæt feor heonon,
mil gemearces,
þæt se mere standeð,
ofer þæm hongiað
hrinde-bearwas.

Fepa eal gesæt ;
gesawon þá æfter wætere
wyrm-cynnes fela,
séllíce sæ-dracan,
sund cunnian;

swylce ön næs-hleopum

nicras licgean,

da on undern mæl

oft bewitigað

sorhfulne sið

on segl-ráde,

wyrmas and wildeór :

They that secret land

inhabit, the wolf's retreats,
windy nesses,

the dangerous fen-path,

where the mountain-stream,
under the nesses' mists,
downward flows,

the flood under the earth.
It is not far thence,
a mile's distance,
that the mere stands,
over which hang
barky groves

The band all sat;
they saw along the water
of the worm-kind many,
strange sea dragons,
tempting the deep;

also in the headland-clefts

nickers lying,

which at morning time

oft keep

their sorrowful course

on the sail-road,

worms and wild beasts.

TO THE TEACHER.-Note the two A. S. characters for our th; the one, in line 2, for th in thine; the other, in line 7, for th in thin. Italicized words in the translation have no equivalents in the original. Ask the pupils to name the A. S. words of the extract still in our language, though changed in spelling.

"The love of wild nature in English poetry, and the peopling of it with wild, half-human things begin in work like this. After the fight Beowulf returns to his own land, where he rules well for many years, till a Fire-drake, who guards a treasure, comes down to harry his people. The old king goes out then to fight his last fight, slays the dragon, but dies of its flaming breath, and his body is burned high up on a seawashed Ness, or headland."

66

Similes are very rare in A. S. poetry. The whole romance of Beowulf contains only five, and these are of the simplest kind; the vessel gliding swiftly over the waves is compared to a bird; the Grendel's eyes to fire; his nails to steel; the light which Beowulf finds in the Grendel's dwelling, under the waters, resembles the serene light of the sun; and the sword which has been bathed in the monster's blood melts immediately like ice."— Wright.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE AND THE ANGLO-SAXON WRITERS.Turner's Hist. of Manners, Poetry, and Lit. of the Anglo-Saxons; H. Corson's Hand-book of A. S. and Early Eng.; H. Morley's Eng. Writers; T. Wright's Biographia Britannica Literaria; Guest's Hist. Eng. Rhythms; Taine's Eng. Lit.; Craik's Eng. Lit.; J. J. Conybeare's Illust. of A. S. Poetry; G. P. Marsh's Origin and Hist. of Eng. Lang.; Prof. Ten Brink's Hist. Eng. Lit.; H. Sweet's Hist. of A. S. Poetry; A. S. Lit. in Encyclo. Britannica; in Johnson's Cyclo.; in Appleton's, and in others.

LESSON 4.

CEDMON. "The poem of Beowulf has the grave Teutonic power, but it is not native to English soil. It is not the first true English poem. That is the work of CEDMON, and is also from Northumbria. The story of it, as told by Bæda, proves that the making of songs was common at the time. Cædmon was a servant to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, at Whitby in Yorkshire. He was somewhat aged when the gift of song came to him, and he knew nothing of the art of verse, so that at the feasts, when for the sake of mirth all sang

in turn, he left the table. One night, having done so and gone to the stables, for he had care of the cattle, he fell asleep, and One came to him in vision and said, 'Cædmon, sing me some song.' And he answered, 'I cannot sing; for this cause I left the feast and came hither.' Then said the other, 'However, you shall sing.' 'What shall I sing?' he replied. Sing the beginning of created things,' answered the other. Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had sung, and added more in verse worthy of God. In the morning he came to the steward, and told him of the gift he had received, and, being brought to Hild, was ordered to tell his dream before learned men that they might give judgment whence his verses came. And, when they had heard, they all said that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by our Lord.

Cædmon's poem, written about 670, is for us the beginning of English poetry, and the story of its origin ought to be loved by us. Nor should we fail to reverence the place where it began. Above the small and land-locked harbor of Whitby rises and juts out towards the sea the dark cliff where Hild's monastery stood, looking out over the German Ocean. It is a wild, wind-swept upland, and the sea beats furiously beneath, and standing there one feels that it is a fitting birthplace for the poetry of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of the first poet without the stormy note of the scenery among which it was written. In it also the old, fierce, war element is felt when Cædmon comes to sing the wrath of the rebel angels with God and the overthrow of Pharaoh's host, and the lines, repeating, as was the old English way, the thought a second time, fall like stroke on stroke in battle. But the poem is religious throughout-Christianity speaks in it simply, sternly, with fire, and brings with it a new world of spiritual romance and feeling. The subjects of the poem were taken from the Bible, in fact Cædmon paraphrased the history of the Old and the New Testament. He sang the creation of the world, the

6

history of Israel, the book of Daniel, the whole story of the life of Christ, future judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven. All who heard it thought it divinely given. Others after him,' says Bæda, 'tried to make religious poems, but none could vie with him, for he did not learn the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from God.' It was thus that English song began in religion. The most famous passage of the poem not only illustrates the dark sadness, the fierce love of freedom, and the power of painting distinct characters which has always marked English poetry, but it is also famous for its likeness to a parallel passage in Milton. It is when Cadmon describes the proud and angry cry of Satan against God from his bed of chains in hell. The two great English poets may be brought together over a space of a thousand years in another way, for both died in such peace that those who watched beside them knew not when they died.

LESSER OLD ENGLISH POEMS.-Of the poetry that came after Cadmon we have few remains. But we have many things said which show us that his poem, like all great works, gave birth to a number of similar ones. The increase of monasteries, where men of letters lived, naturally made the written poetry religious. But an immense quantity of secular poetry was sung about the country. ALDHELM, a young man when Cædmon died, and afterwards Abbot of Malmesbury, united the song-maker to the religious poet. He was a skilled musician, and it is said that he had not his equal in the making or singing of English verse. His songs were popular in King Alfred's time, and a pretty story tells that, when the traders came into the town on the Sunday, he, in the character of a gleeman, stood on the bridge and sang them songs, with which he mixed up Scripture text and teaching. Of all this wide-spread poetry we have now only the few poems brought together in a book preserved at Exeter, in another found at Vercelli, and in a few leaflets of manuscripts. The poems in the Vercelli book are all religious-legends of saints and addresses to the soul;