Nature in Old English Poetry

IN the epic of Beowulf, our first great English epic, with almost countless references to the winter season, the sweet, antithetical season of summer is not once mentioned. This fact is significant, and stands for a good deal. At first it appears sufficiently astonishing. England is fair now in the season, and it was so at the end of the fourteenth century when Monk Langland began to sing : —

No winter rhyme this, of a truth. It was so, too, a hundred years earlier, in 1300, when a nameless poet warbled of spring in this wise : —

If this be the note of the bards in the year of grace 1400 or 1300, why not in the seventh or eighth century, five hundred years before, which is the presumable date of the Beowulf? It is hardly a satisfactory answer to say that the beauty of nature was there, but not the eyes to see it. Old English literature is rife with passages testifying to appreciation of the sterner mood of nature, a cognizance of her wintry phenomena, her rigors of land and sky and water. It is only on the side of warmth and bloom and fragrance that the poetry is so woefully lacking in expression, so insensitive to loveliness and joyance. The explanation lies in large part elsewhere. To give one reason : the first poetry written down in England partakes of the atmosphere of the physical conditions of the country whence come the original settlers, namely, that of the low-lying lands of the Baltic, the North Sea, and the more northerly Atlantic. Beowulf itself, for example, is entirely un-English and Continental in its locale, the scene shifting from Denmark to Sweden. And so with the lesser poetical product: it is the climate of the lowlands, of Norwegian fiords and Danish nesses, that is in the English literature of the earliest period of production ; hence it is the darker and grimmer phases of nature which are voiced and pictured in the poetry. A striking illustration of this is to be seen in an Old English idiom. It was not the AngloSaxon’s way to use the word “year" as a denominator of time; he spoke of “thirty of winters" instead of thirty years, evidently an unconscious tribute to the prominence of that cold and nipping season in his calendar.

Another explanation of this fondness of our ancestors for winter landscape brings us within the domain of psychology. The first poetry of the race is preChristian, heathen in warp and woof ; and in the literature which antedates Christianity — which has Odin and Thor in the heavens and fatalism as its ethical creed, instead of the sunburst of hope and joy which comes with the white Christ and his cheerier promises of happiness and heaven — the poetic spirit is distinctly, indubitably, more joyless, less perceptive of the bright side of things. Nature, which to the modern poet is but the garment of God, was to his Old English forbears a chilling rather than an inspiriting spectacle; for back of the myth-gods themselves stood Fate, Necessity, with laws that no man may dodge, and with an iron will in place of a tender heart. Germanic mythology and literature give a lively sense of all this.

These two causes, then (to mention no more), blend to bring about a fact which, at first blush, strikes the modern student as curious and repellent.

As a result of this dominant note of winter in Old English poetry an effect of gloom and sternness is made on us, especially if we come to the study full of the tropic exuberance and troubadour gayety which run through the literary product of the Romance peoples; or if we are steeped in the bland brightness of classic imagery; or again, if we are conversant with the rich color and sensuous languors of some of the Oriental literatures. It is somewhat gray business, this harping on the one string, this chronicling of only such objective phenomena as are characteristic of the frozen earth and the ice-beaten sea. Yet if sunny charm and color play and soft melody are wanting, there is great graphic power and a sort of wild music in many of the descriptions; we get good etchings, strong black-and-white work, if not the landscapes of Claude and Turner; and there is stimulation for one who has been bred in softer pleasures to turn for the nonce from scented rose gardens and lute tinklings to the sound of storm-swept pines, the smell of briny waters, and the sight of blood-flecked battle-shields shaken in mortal combat. “ Pretty ” may not be the adjective to apply to such a poetic product, but “fine” and “strong” and “ virile ” emphatically are.

Examples follow of the way in which the manifold demonstrations of the external world wrought upon our forefathers, as they feasted, hunted, fought, and prayed in Saxon England more than a thousand years ago, and how this found vent in their song. In time, no doubt, we shall have the whole body of Old English poetry in a form which will commend it to popular use and appreciation ; as yet, however, much remains to be done, and every worker may contribute his mite. In turning the passages into modern English, the AngloSaxon verse-line, with its four stresses, or accents, and its definite alliteration taking the place of the later device of rhyme, is reproduced as nearly as may be. Inevitably, the result is a metre of so much looser, less regular rhythm that an effect of carelessness and comparative formlessness is produced on the reader familiar with more modern verse laws. The rhymeless dithyrambs of Walt Whitman are at times suggested. But although the conception of metrical movement is freer, the laws that govern it are as exact and the artistic limitations as rigorously obeyed as anything that more recent poetry can show. It is a popular error to regard this early verse product as rude and deficient in art.

The long, striking, and beautiful lyric known as The Wanderer, a truly representative poem in its sadness and full of the lament of personal bereavement, contains but two brief references to nature. This is an indication of how laconic is the early jimet’s use of this embellishment or accessory which in modern times threatens to preempt the whole canvas at the expense of motifs and animated foregrounds. Even the most subjective of Old English poets was not satisfied to paint a picture for the mere picture’s sake. The Wanderer, a minstrel, is imagined at sea, having lost all his friends, including the lord whose vassal he once was, and is thinking over his past with sick memory. Having dreamed of better times, when his lord clipped him and kissed him, while the bard in turn affectionately laid his hand and head on the kingly knee, he wakes to a realization of his present misery : —

And the poem says that at the sight — this welter of storm-smit waters instead of the warm, feast-glad interior of the great hall — the scald’s heart is made the heavier. It is a veritable etching, a sea piece in monochrome, and very typical. It may be said here that perhaps no one phenomenon of nature plays so large a part in Old English literature as the sea, because it played so large a part in the life as well, and again was a monster that spoke the Saxon’s sense of the change, the bigness, and the mystery of human days. It were interesting to trace its steady influence in the great singers of the race. Think what inspiration, what imagery, it has furnished Shakespeare, and a long train of successors down to Swinburne and Whitman ! The epithet “ fallow ” as applied to the waves, in the lines just cited, is very fine, and shows the true selective felicity of poetry. In contrast with the gray clouds and the snow-filled air, the water would have taken on just that dusky yellow tinge described by the word. The color scheme of the Anglo-Saxons, it may be remarked, was far more restricted than is ours to-day. Several of our commonest colors appear not at all, and light and shade seem to have made the strongest impression upon them. This fact is a curious commentary on a passage in one of Ruskin’s lectures on art, where he remarks that “ the way by color is taken by men of cheerful, natural, and entirely sane disposition in body and mind, much resembling, even at its strongest, the temper of well-brought-up children ; ” while, contrariwise, “ the way l)y light and shade is taken by men of the highest power of thought and most earnest desire for truth ; they long for light, and for knowledge of all that light can show. But seeking for light, they perceive also darkness; seeking for substance and truth, they find vanity. They look for form in the earth, for dawn in the sky, and, seeking these, they find formlessness in the earth and night in the sky.” It hardly seems amiss to name as exponents of the two types here adumbrated the man of Romance stock, sun-loving and insouciant, and the Teuton, with his mood bred of northern gloom and barrenness.

The second passage in The Wanderer occurs near the close of the lyric. The singer gives a gloomy picture of the earth when the evil days come of loss and change, of age and desolation : —

This is vivid description, and proves a vigorous grasp of vocabulary and a happy power in seizing on typically representative features of a wintry landscape. It is not cataloguing, but the movement of the awakened imagination.

In the mysterious ill-defined lyric which Grein calls The Wife’s Plaint, and which seems to tell of a woman exiled in a sad, dim wood, far away from her husband, there is a short description which again has shadow and sorrow for its setting, the woman’s ill stead being echoed and transcribed in the phase of the external world which is presented. She is telling of her banishment and the place of her abode : —

The reference to The Wife’s Plaint turns the mind instinctively to the longer and remarkable lyric known as The Ruin ; only a fragment, but as precious in its way as oae of Sappho’s, and full of Old English feeling for the dark things of life, fairly reveling in descriptions of physical destruction. Tlie subject is a city in ruined decay and neglect, and the poem deals scarcely at all with nature directly, but rather with the effects of time upon the work of men as seen in the fallen wall and tower and rain-pierced roof. In the tenth line, however, there is a touch worth noting. The artisan who built all this mighty structure, says the poet, is long dead, and now his work after him is crumbling to naught. But it was not always so.

The descriptive touch en parenthèse is as accurate and careful as it is laconic. It implies real and fresh observation, and a wish for truthful representation.

Another lyric which may well be placed in evidence is that called The Seafarer ; it contains several descriptive passages which make it interesting for our particular study. It pictures a lonely seafarer afloat on tlie waters, with the usual unpleasant concomitants of bad weather and bleak season : —

Here we have a full-length portrait of misery, with much vividness and particularity in putting before us the monody of sea and sky and fate. A little further on, the scald seems to imagine himself on land in the winter, and, with the inconsistency of human nature, he gets up a longing for the very terrors he has expended so much energy in bemoaning : —

Truth to tell, the Anglo-Saxons minded stiff weather on the water far less than we their degenerate descendants. They knew the sea in all her moods; they lived and fought upon her, and their entrustment of the dead body to her at the last, the death-boat pushing out into the open brine to float at will of wind and wave, is a touching proof of the magic and magnetism she exercised upon their mind.

Another passage in the poem must be given. This time it is a brief description of spring, and a pleasing one : —

But now comes the typically Old English melancholy, like a death’s-head at the feast:—

It is suggestive, in the face of this treatment of the cuckoo as a harbinger of woe, to compare therewith Wordsworth’s exquisite poem to this bird : —

And then the closing stanza : —

Here is spiritualized cheerfulness instead of sorry forecast, bearing out my assertion of the more hopeful interpretation of nature under the reign of Christ.

Mention must be made of the two fine ballads, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon. The former, embedded like a glowing ruby in the dull gray prose of the Saxon Chronicles for the year 937, contains a couple of bits of nature description, and one of them may be given. The theme of the ballad is the victory won over the Scots and Northmen by King Athelstan and Eadnmnd the Etlieling, his brother ; and the chosen extract is characteristically sombre and Old English. It deals with beast-kind, with the three creatures, feathered or four-footed, who are inevitable grim concomitants of the battlefield in the unsavory post-bellum capacity of scavengers. The mention of birds and beasts like these, instead of the innocent and lovesome song-makers who warble and chirp in modern verse, is another indication of the gloomy mood of our heathen forefathers. The victorious king and the Etlieling, says the poet, sought their own homes in Wessex, turning their backs on the bloody field with its harvest of dead bodies.

That evil triumvirate, the raven, the hawk, and the wolf, fairly haunt Old English poetry ; and this is largely explained by the predominance of tlie theme of war’s havoc, which naturally brings the creatures of prey in its train. They give occasion for some of the finest passages in this drastic vein, and, however unpleasant to modern aesthetics, it were foolish not to feel how truthful and keenly observant and vigorously sketched are such lines as these just quoted.

The Battle of Maid on, although a much longer poem, contains hardly a trace of nature-painting, being sternly epic. Brunanburh is a more triumphant song than Chevy Chace; Maldon, contrariwise, chronicles the dire defeat of the brave alderman Bryhtnoth, in Essex, in the year 991, by the Vikings. The single example, again of grim suggestion, is a brief two-line stroke. The fight is fierce; the doomed ones begin to fall, and the scavengers with unseemly haste to gather : —

It remains to speak of the literary monument which in importance as well as in length overtops all else in poetry that Old English days have bequeathed to us ; I mean the Beowulf. The reader is reminded that the theme of Beowulf is the deeds and days of the great hero by that name ; who visits the Danish King Hrothgar; fights, and eventually kills, the fierce dragon who is depopulating the great hall of the latter; returns to his native land of Gotland, in Sweden, and rules there prosperously for fifty winters as king, until he dies, heavy with years and honors, in a conflict with another dragon, and is buried with due pomp by the seashore, and mourned as a good lord, — a lofty death-barrow being erected in his honor, with a bright beacon thereon, that the distant ship-farer may be cheered. So far as the treatment of nature is concerned, this poem is grim and gloomy in the main. We hear much of dusk stony cliffs, of weird waterways (the supernatural comes much into play in the poem), of wintry moors and bleak earth-holes, but next to nothing of the shine and the joyance of life, either objective or subjective. What joyance there is, is of battle, or of beer-drinking about the hearth fire at night. So that the greatest Old English poetical production bears out the reiterated statement that it is the night side of nature which is presented in the earliest literature. The first passage cited brings up a scene in the great hall of King Hrothgar, who is entertaining Beowulf, just arrived from his sea journey with his attendant troop. Ale and mead have been circulated, and one of Hrothgar’s Thanes, who is well drunken, twits Beowulf with being outdone in a famous swimming match in the ocean by one Breca. Beowulf indignantly denies this insinuation, and straightway tells the true tale of how he beat Breca. Never is the Old English hero backward in coming forward about his own deeds ; modesty, as we reckon it, was not one of his prominent traits. Siegfried in Wagner’s operas, another Germanic hero, furnishes a further example. In the course of Beowulf’s story we get this description of the winter sea. It is left to the hearer to imagine the icycold of the water and its effects on the hardy swimmers.

By mere-fishes here are meant whales, and the powerful statement is therefore made that the upheaval of the sea was such as to disturb even leviathan. It will be seen that, on the whole, this swimming match is accompanied by rather more serious incidents and conducted under more stringent conditions than the average wager of its kind. Further on in the poem, after Beowulf has successfully met the monster Grendel, and driven him, howling with rage at the loss of an arm, hack to his native fen, his mother, the she-dragon, comes by night to avenge her son, and seizes one of Hrothgar’s henchmen, bearing him off to feed on his body. In the morning the king is made aware of this occurrence, and on meeting Beowulf tells him of it, bewailing his loss. He enters into a detailed description of Grendel and his dam, his habitat, how dread the place is, and calls on Beowulf for help in his grievance and peril. During his monologue comes this picture of the lair of these uncanny pests : —

The deep-mouthed, resonant tonecolor of the vernacular gives voice well to the idea of the eerie aloofness and mystery of the place. One thinks, in reading such a description, of the palette of a Rembrandt or the word power of a Dante. Only a few lines further on the picture receives a few additional details : —

In its elements of mournful mystery, its touch of magic, and its imaginative grouping of the terrors incident to the stern aspect of sea and land in the north, such writing may be marked as finely representative not only of Old English, but of early Germanic literature, which still retained Aryan features of pre-Christian cultus and folk lore.

The examples given of Beowulf fairly represent the prevailing manner and tone of the epic in treating nature ; and, as will have been seen from the other citations made, it is also typical of the general body of verse, whether epic or lyric, of this first period. I remark here in passing that there is not in the whole poem a reference to the moon, — that melancholy orb of night, — when, a priori, we might well expect a poet so glum-minded to take advantage of it as good material to hand. But the sadness of the Germanic hard has not a touch of sentimentalizing about it; it is not moonstruck moaning, but the recognition of harsh fate by heroes and warriors.

The transition from the poetry of the heroic period to the monkish writings of such men as Cædmon and Cynewulf is hardly an abrupt one. The earlier vigor, raciness, and naïveté are not wholly lost when we come to the later verse-making. Yet certain well-defined characteristics serve to mark off the two products, and the interpretation of nature in each case is an earmark of the change. The most primitive poetry is sung by unknown scalds, working over and retouching the original from generation to generation ; modern criticism finds this to be true of Beowulf as it does of Homer. But in the transitional time we get a definite name attached to the verse product, as the poet-cowherd Cædmon, or Cynewulf, the mysterious scald of Northumbria. The subject matter, too, changes; Csedmon making metrical paraph rases of the Old Testament, and Cynewulf shaping into narrative poems of epic dignity and scope the mediaeval Christian legends. Where before was the Germanic myth unadulterated we meet with themes borrowed from the Latin; and the older heathen fatalism, with its attendant mood of pessimism and affiliation with the darker things of the external world, makes way for the milder horoscope of the new religion, with a cheerier reflection of nature. The signs at first are somewhat chary, since the earl who invokes Thor cannot be smoothed over into the meek-hearted Christ-lover in a trice, — and indeed the treatment of religious things by these early poets often reminds one of the fabled wolf in sheep’s clothing; yet for this very reason a racy originality is imparted to the handling of themes traditionally dull and prosy, and the verse of religious motives has a literary value.

The names of Cædmon and Cynewulf, the first Christian poets of the English tongue, are to be associated with ecclesiastic culture, and are of moment in the evolution of the native poetry. The true successors of the harpers whose names and titles are lost in the archaic twilight of time, they were English above all else, poets before they were scholars. If their subject matter be largely religious, and if the didactic note be struck again and again, passage after passage can be quoted which rivals the heathen song in its epic lilt and predilection for the martial and heroic. The verse of such singers may not be overlooked by the critic in his perpetual still-hunt for aesthetic pleasure,

Cædmon has been called the Saxon Milton. The appellation is not inapt, the Puritan poet’s possible obligation to his predecessor and the similarity of their treatment making the nexus all the more real; but in regard to his origin and idiosyncrasy Cædmon is rather the prototype of a modern people-poet, like Burns : the one summoned from the oxstall, the other from the plough, to tell of the things of the spirit; both humble in birth and occupation, and with distinct folk traits and sympathies. The Whitby poet sings in strong, sweet speech of the Israelitish quest of the Promised Land, or of such stirring happenings as those which centre around Judith as protagonist. And throughout his Bible-inspired epics it is curious to see the moody earnestness of the Saxon merged in the solemn, mystic-dreamy, or jubilant joy of the neophyte ; this blend of character and influence coloring the touches of nature as it does other phases of the work. His verses are paraphrase in the broadest, freest sense. Whenso the singer wills, he expands, interpolates, introduces so much of local color that the composition comes to have independent and creative worth.

In Caedmon’s Genesis, where God comforts Abram by telling him that his seed shall be like the stars in heaven for number, the bard amplifies the statement in this manner : —

Here a distinct, new note is struck: the heavenly lights are considered as emanations from God, the Source of light. When we hear in Beowulf of “ God’s beautiful beacon,” Christian interpolation is at once suggested. We saw something of the typical treatment of animals in the epic : contrast therewith this tender description of the dove sent forth to find a resting-place and bring tidings of terra firma to the sea-weary folk. The Testament account is again laconic ; the amplification such as to imply artistic appreciation of opportunity : —

We get here the initiative of the modern treatment. And one notices tills in an Old English poet for the reason that both Cædmon and Cynewulf can on occasion paint in the dark pigments of the elder hards. The following, for example, from the Exodus, reminds the student forcibly of the passage already given from the ballad of Brunanburh, and is every whit as savage and heathen ; it masses the details of a fight between Moses leading the Israelites and the hosts of Pharaoh: —

Turning to the fragmentary Judith, the irrepressible relish for a sanguinary encounter breaks out, and there is very little of the cloistral student felt in the breathless lines which tell how the Hebrew woman slew Holofernes. One harks back to Brunanburh, to Beowulf, to such other Germanic monuments as the Hildebrand, or some of the Eddie poems, in reading it. Such literature suggests how Shakespeare, child of his age for all his genius, could heap up the murders in his plays, and take so kindly to the belligerent and the bloody. The Elizabethans were three hundred years nearer the Old English than ourselves, and the first epics of our race are battle pieces, the first motif is that of war. But despite the redness of Judith as a whole, it has a peaceful close, the final passage celebrating nature as created joyously by the Maker of men ; and it could not have been written until after Augustine in the south and the Irish in the north had spoken of Christ to English folk : —

The accent of the heathen invocation in such a place would be very different. Shelley is hinted and foreshadowed in more than one nature apostrophe of these early Christian poets, — Shelley minus his subjectivity. The same cosmic sweep of the imagination is noticeable.

The singer’s picture of the Garden of Eden in all its primal and virgin loveliness shows again an appreciation of new subject matter: —

In reading this verse, one is often reminded of the solecisms, anachronisms, and amusing artlessnesses of a later literary product which equals the younger in virility, the Elizabethan drama. In the strong, felicitous, and frequent use of the metaphor, also, Shakespeare and his fellows are leal descendants of the Old English, while more modern poetry has developed at the expense of the metaphor that expanded and weakened form of it known as the simile. Stopford Brooke has pointed out that with a poet like Caedmon, a Whitby man who looked forth upon the stormy waters of the Northumbrian coast while weaving his song, it was natural he should tell of the sea with imaginative vigor and felicity, as when he sang of Noah and the flood. Mostly, as earlier, it is the serious and sombre aspects which are depicted ; but it is worth noting that when we come to Cynewulf such new compounds as “ seabright ” and “ sea-calm ” are made to portray the more amiable side of this moody monster.

Cædmon’s subjects are essentially epic and grandiosely religious ; in the ease of Cynewulf we enter into the atmosphere of Middle-Age legend and worship, the cycle of hagiography, with an occasional excursus in the more primitive field, as in the Riddles. But by no means do the Old English qualities go by the board. If such themes as those of the Andreas and the Juliana suggest the studious cloister, the speech of the bard smacks of the soil, and there is enough of the epic and the folk-touch to prevent them from becoming scholastic and unattractive. Ten Brinck’s remark that "the introduction of Christianity was doubtless one of the causes that destroyed the productive power of epic poetry,” while true in the abstract, must not be applied with strictness to Cædmon and Cynewulf; they were near enough the heroic day still to breathe its air. In the latter’s Christ, a loosely constructed work of a choral-epic nature, which celebrates the Nativity, Ascension, and Day of Judgment, a single line gives an example of the imaginative touch, and conceives of nature as a vassal contributing her beauty to the glory of heaven. The seraphim who sing about the throne are described, and the poet sings : —

the Wielder being God, who wields power over all. The italicized clause embodies a conception which has a largeness reminding one of the work of a Michael Angelo. One thinks instinctively of Milton’s scene : —

This brief passage from the Christ is nobly epic and large moving : —

There is a sound of pantheism in this, and again comes the naïve stroke in the epithet “ heroes ” where “ sinners ” would be the conventional later word. It took centuries of masses and missals to make the Old Englishman admire the saint type more than the martial leader. Cynewulf’s Andreas (now by the latest theory awarded to a follower rather than to himself ) is a narrative poem which describes the delivery of Matthew from a Mermedonian prison by Andrew, who dwells in Achaia, and who therefore has to make a sea journey in faring on his quest of rescue. It is full of sea pictures, and the color is that of the northeast coast of England, the singer’s presumable home. In the passage following, the saint has been borne by angels to land, and left asleep on a highway near the Mermedonian city: —

Here the thought is of light driving out darkness ; it would have been more in the way of the heathen poet to give us tiie day swallowed up in the huge black maw of night. In the second line translated is an example of the constant perplexity of one who essays to turn Old English into more modern speech. I have retained the word" up-way ” (like the German Aufgang) as it stands in the original, for it is certainly an admirably descriptive substantive for the airy path followed by the angelic messengers in flying back to heaven. One runs the danger of making either a bizarre effect or an obscure reading in such a case, the result being a frequent abandonment of the fine, strong, fresh Old English diction.

But not always did Cynewulf elect religious subjects ; the series of remarkable Riddles, which rank among his best productions, are secular in subject, heathen in spirit, and full of the flavor of folk lore, myth, and northern melancholy. Yet there is a divergence from the oldest epic type : the writer of these puzzlepoems has, after all, felt the amelioration of the new religion, and its influence may be traced in the lyrico-subjective position of the bard toward nature. Commingling with the feeling for the savagery of beast-kind is a certain spiritual good fellowship which foretokens Coleridge, Byron, and Wordsworth. Beside the dark, battle-ravenous raven we see the bright, high-bred falcon associated with the aristocratic chase and the stately king hall. In Riddle Eight the swan is thus done in rapid crayon, for the reader’s guessing : —

Riddle Fifty-Eight limns a somewhat mysterious brown bird, the identification of which may perhaps be left most safely to Mr. Burroughs. Luckily, uncertainty as to name does not interfere with enjoyment of the brief, beautiful description : —

The hint in the final line suggests whippoor-will, Bob White, and other songsters, but the analogy is not carried out. In Old English verse nothing of the lyric or idyllic sort is more imaginative than the subjoined sketch of the nightingale, in the ninth Riddle ; it has the interpretative quality removing it far from mere detail work : —

We must make some requisition upon a long and remarkable passage from Cynewulf’s allegorical poem, The Phœnix, a piece based upon the Latin, but much increased in volume and thoroughly Old English. The Phœnix is also an interesting example of the allegoric use of nature (here exemplified in the strange bird which names the composition) in the service of religious laudation. The bard uses a free hand in limning the praises of Paradise ; and on the whole, the finest work of Cynewulf, and perhaps of Christian poetry, in the broad style, is embodied in the glowing and vibrant words and cadences. Notice the Old English conception of the Home of the Blessed as an island. The sense of this mid-earth as water-girdled which is common to the several Germanic literatures is blended in this case with that thought of England’s ocean-fretted isle which made the greatest poet of the language see it imaginatively as a "precious stone set in the silver sea.”

The faults of such descriptive writing are monotony, the repetition of stock phrases, the working over of the same thought. Nevertheless, it has a noble manner, and a charm of diction that makes for true poetry.

I hope the survey has now been wide enough to make the reader willing to believe that the treatment of nature in Old English poetry, in this its first manifestation, is something distinct, original, and of high poetic value. It affords a welcome insight into the mind and the imagination of our Saxon predecessors, and both by what it says and leaves unsaid yields interesting testimony with regard to their attitude toward the external world of terror, power, and beauty. That attitude was vastly different from our own, more limited in perception, less enlightened, gloomier in mood, registering a state of half-development. But it had fine and characteristic points about it : the Old English imaginative vigor and grip, though largely sardonic ; the creative impulse, though vibrant to coarser passions and childish on the subjective side ; a poetic sense of the shifting gloom and glory of human life as voiced in nature or flashed forth in the bravery and loyalty of human kind; a pathetic appreciation of the dreams and glories of religion; and a power over the mother tongue very impressive, making it to give forth grave chords of harmony to grief, to echo the wild joy of the elements, to shrill like clarions in the onset of weapons, or to soften in the mystic melodies of worship. It is manly poetry, and one cannot read it and fail to get a bracing of the mental sinews, and a larger sense of the essential qualities of his race in their ideal aspects and deeper workings. Although we may declare without hesitation that English literature is still to-day Germanic in its backbone and vitals, nevertheless it has been subjected to so much of outside and disparate influence that, compared with the literary product of the Old English time, it is a composite thing. Hence, in getting in touch with Beowulf or with some of the other early lyrics and ballads, we are going back to the originals, and are given a glimpse at the substructure whereupon is built the noble edifice of our many-towered and multi-ornamented literature. The Old English lyric (such a poem as The Scald’s Lament, or The Seafarer) is the corner stone ; Tennyson and Browning, Carlyle and Ruskin, Hawthorne and Longfellow, Emerson and Lowell, are the lofty terraces and gracious spires which pierce to heaven and catch the eye with rapture from afar, seeming unearthly in their aerial splendor, their proportioned and thoughtful majesty.

Richard Burton.