iambic pentameter as seen in blank verse. This fact suggests psychologic causes and offers a fascinating line of inquiry. How different the swing of the tripping trochees or leaping dactyls from the stately march of the line of Marlowe or Shakespeare! I subjoin a single Old English line with the stresses marked, by way of illustra

tion:

"Hále hilde-deor Hróthgar grêtan."

("The hale hero, Hrothgar to greet.")

Two other characteristics of Old English verse remain to be mentioned — the metaphor and parallelism. The metaphor is to our primary poetry what the simile is to its later development; it is a stylistic feature permeating all Old English writing, and it imparts an effect of vividness and force that give the literary product a distinct complexion of its own. Readers of the Elizabethan dramatists are aware what a leading rôle is there played by the metaphor- -or kenning, as it is known in Old Norse poetry- when compared with its modern use. But with Shakespeare and his contemporaries the simile (which is only the metaphor ex

tended) is also made much of, sharing the rhetorical honors with its older fellow-figure. But in the Old English days, the simile was practically undeveloped; it was for a later and more self-conscious age to cultivate it. Thus, in the epic of Beowulf, a composition of about 3,200 lines, there is but one simile in the modern expanded sense, while metaphors star every page. The gain in strength by this close-packed, terse figuration is immense.

Again, Old English shares with Hebrew poetry the characteristic of parallelism or repetition of the thought in slightly altered phrasing. The Hebrew Scriptures offer hundreds of familiar and wellloved illustrations: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." Similar constructions continually meet the student of Old English verse, or indeed of Germanic verse in general, whether English, Low or High German, or Scandinavian. At bottom this socalled parallelism is, in all probability, the creature of the emotional impulse which by the law of its being demands a wave-like repetend of the thought ex

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pressed, by clauses of parallel formation. The impulse, too, being emotional, is also rhythmical, and here is another reason for repetition. In Old English, however, what was in its genesis impulsive and of the emotions became a formal mark of verse, and a most effective rhetorical device, when skilfully managed.

With these brief comments upon some of the most obvious phenomena of Old English poetry on its subjective and objective sides, let us come at our study of two of its aspects.

II

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:

"In a summer season When soft was the sun,

I was weary of wandering, and went me to rest
Under a broad bank by a bourne side."

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:

"Between the March and April,
When sprays begin to spring,

The little fowls they have their will
In their own way to sing."

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 moods 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 wofully 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 lowlying 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

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