and finally returns with the two heads of these giant foes. Then he rests in the great hall Heorot.

"Rested him, the ample-hearted;

the mansion towered,
vaulted, and golden-hued,

the guest slept therein

until the black raven,
Heaven's delight,

blithe of heart, announced

the bright sun coming."

At the close of the poem Beowulf returns to his home, where, as his last act of prowess, he slays a huge dragon which devastated the land, and in doing it receives his death-wound. Before his death he divides among the young warriors his shield, his war-shirt of "ringed iron," and his other weapons of war. After his death his people make a great pyre, put all his riches on it, and burn them, with their chief's body.

This is a bare outline, with scanty extracts, from the oldest entire poem which wears the dress of our earliest English speech. If from this you have caught any of its spirit, you may be able to fancy, with me, that there is something Homeric about this rude epic. But it is a Homer of the North, not of the South, who sings. A blast of the north wind seems to blow through and through these lines. The beauty and grace of Homer's heroes are not seen in this Gothic chieftain. It is the brute strength of the Northern peoples that we find in him. Yet some of the characteristics of poetry are not lacking to this early poetry. Night is called "the shadow-covering of creatures; "death is "the terrible life-devourer;" the door is the "hall's mouth." Although generally bare of ornament, and not rich in imagination, it has a few touches that show the genuine poetic spirit. Bare and bald as it is, I think you may be able to hear in it the birth-cry of our English Muse, a true nursling of the Northern peoples, cradled under the skies of a rugged and wintry clime.

There are a number of specimens of early English poetry

which are almost as old as the Beowulf, and one or two fragments which may have been committed to writing even earlier. One such collection of poetry, called the “Exeter Book," was given by a good bishop to the library of Exeter Cathedral some time in the eleventh century. Most of these poems are on religious subjects, although two or three of the most poetical in the book have an air of even greater antiquity than the Christian religion on English soil. Let me give you a few lines from one of these old poems, “The Sea-farer," which might have been sung by some old viking in the earliest times that the ships of the Northmen sailed the seas. He begins,

ness, which almost makes one shiver in reading it, and you will feel that the unknown poet knew something of the poetic art.

IV.

ON THE FORM OF EARLY ENGLISH POETRY, AND THE OLD POEM OF CEDMON.

EFORE going farther, I want you to glance at the con

BEFORE

struction of this early poetry, and to note in what way it differs from the poetry of other peoples. Its most marked difference is its alliteration, or the use of the same initial letter to begin a certain number of words in a line of poetry. The verses were written like prose; for a long time they were not supposed to be cast in poetical form, as there was no use of capital letters at the beginning of lines. There was, however, a little mark, like a colon or semicolon, dividing the poem into lines; and these lines consisted usually of two important and two unimportant syllables. Of such a pair of lines the two most important words of the first, and the most important of the second, had the same initial; thus:

"The grim guest
Grendel hight."

"An un-winsome wood,

water stood under it.

The water welled blood;
the warriors gazed

on the hot heart's blood,
while the horn rung

a doleful death-note."

This system of alliteration, which was used by the Scandinavians as well as the English, is the distinguishing mark of the poetry of the North. Probably this use of consonant initials was as natural to these Northern peoples as the music of rhythm and the jingling of rhyme were to the nations of the South of Europe, where the language was so rich in vowels and so soft in sound. Certainly the use of a recurring consonant seems natural to the poets of the North, and we shall see that alliteration is much used by poets in later

English, and that it often crops out in our poetry even at the present day.

The first noted poetical outcome of the English Muse after the land was Christianized was the work of Cædmon, of whom very little is known, except that he lived near the convent of Whitby, which was presided over by the Abbess Hilda, one of that long line of saintly women who are found in the early annals of the Christian Church.

This Cadmon, according to the earliest account, was present at some convivial party, where it was the custom, as from the earliest times among all Teutonic peoples, to sing or recite, while the others feasted, and each was called upon in turn to perform his part. But when it came to him to sing, Cadmon got up and went out, he was so ashamed of his ignorance. Going out into the stable among the cattle, the care of which was that night committed to him, he fell asleep there. In his dream he heard a voice saying, "Cædmon, sing to me." He answered, “Thou knowest I cannot sing." Then the voice replied, "However, you shall sing." "What shall I sing?" asked Cædmon, meekly. "Sing thou the beginning of created things." And on this he began to praise God in verse, and to utter a long poem in his dream. On waking he was still inspired by the influence he had felt in his sleep, and continued to sing the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the whole story of Paradise Lost. Taken before the Abbess Hilda, she persuaded him to enter the monastery, and he lived and died there in great holiness, leaving as his work this first English epic which Christianity inspired in England.

The poem opens with a description of the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven, the Creation, the Temptation and Fall, and goes on through nearly all the dramatic incidents of the Old Testament. Here are the lines that follow the account of Satan's conspiracy and rebellion:

"Then was God angry,

and wroth with that host
whom he erst had honcred
with beauty and glory;

he formed for these false ones
an exile home,

anguish for reward,

the groans of hell,

hard punishment;

bade the torture-house

await the victims."

After he has banished Lucifer and his rebels, God creates the earth and man to re-people the sky, empty of the angels he has banished to hell. Of the earth the old poem says,

"There had not here as yet

save cavern shade

aught been;

but this wide abyss

stood deep and dim,

strange to its Lord,

idle and useless."

Satan's speech of discontent has a shadowy likeness to Milton's Satan :

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