beliefs and feelings, people and actions, so that all becomes veritable and explicable: to know them not formally and by effort and intention, but spontaneously, through the dynamic communication of heat and light. Instead of the statics of knowledge we are given the dynamics of life.

I

OLD ENGLISH POETRY

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THE day is fast arriving when attention will be paid to the treasures of our older English poetry as such. It is natural enough that the study of the language in its philological aspects should be precedent to an appreciation of the literary side. of the subject. This has, in fact, been the case. But as special students of English have been long familiarizing themselves with the linguistic problems in connection with Old English work, the ground has been prepared for those whose chief interest is in the humanities, and who would use the acquired land as a field for the cultivation of the flowers of song. Signs are not lacking that what has been regarded as the private preserves of specialists will soon be the legitimate property of all lovers of literature. It is significant that an attempt to offer a literary transla

a sharp and bracing keenness for the soft languors and southland allurements to which he may have been more accustomed. This poetry, forsooth! This is barbaric, inchoate, an outrage on the æsthetic, and unworthy even of the nether slopes of Parnassus. Somewhat so runs his thought. But persisting in the will to get at one with this strange product, the same student in due time begins to feel the tonic of the air; to habituate himself to the rough, bold grandeur of the scenery; to enjoy the natural cadences of the wind that harps in his ear. In other words, what seemed irregularity of rhythm is seen to be a looser-moving but lawabiding metre; harshnesses of word-use reveal their fitness and vigor; and a deep, rich music, a fuller-mouthed tone-color, is heard, such as modern words and melodies are more miserly in offering; while uncouth inversions and sentence-gyrations resolve themselves into the fit and felicitous way whereby those gleemen of long ago vented the song and sentiment that was in them. And so there comes a real delight in the virile strength and grave sub-tones of music germane to Old English verse.

As is now pretty well understood, alliteration, employed with regularity and artistic consciousness, is to Old English poetry what rhyme is to modern, the latter being unknown. In offering

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lation, then, of such verse, its alliterative character, as well as its rhythmic character, may be reproduced when possible, or the more familiar and pleasing form, blank verse, be used. In the following papers the Old English line is used in the one case, blank verse in the other, that the two may be compared. As to the law of the use of alliteration, it is enough to say here that every normal Old English line has four accents, divided by a cæsura, and that three of these the first, second, and third take the alliteration on the rhythmically accented word. Add to this that the lilt or measure is prevailingly trochaic with such intermixture of dactyls as to give a freer and less monotonous effect, and an intelligent notion of the mechanics of Old English poetry may be had. Thus it will be seen that the oldest versetype in English is opposed in its movement to what may be called the modern verse-type, par excellence; namely, the