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 appre

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ciation 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 one's 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 manytowered 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 aërial splendor, their proportioned and thoughtful majesty.

III

WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY

IN

N the literary history of the nations certain stimuli have always evoked imaginative expression in poetry. Certain ideals, though the times were rude, and crude the degree of civilization, have irresistibly inspired the makers of song and story. Nature is one such: Nature, with her elemental forces, her protean moods, her lovely witnesses in flower, tree, and bird, in field and sky, in mountain height and limitless stretch of farresounding sea. Such, too, is man himself on his heroic, his martial and mythic side blazoned in war by minstrel and weaver of epic poem; rich with the stories showing forth the valor, faith, and patriotism of humanity in a thousand perils and shifts of fate. Yet another such, and perhaps more alluring and fruitful as a motive than any other in the cycle of themes meet for the lyric and dramatic expression of all

times and peoples, is the subject of woman in all the manifold and winsome connotations of the word. The eternal feminine has lured men on from Eden's day to our own. Rob literature, rob verse of this, and you leave them poor indeed. Colonel Higginson has said that the test of a civilization is the estimate of women, suggesting the thought that the apotheosis of the sex in song is a registry of ethnic culture as well as of ethnic imagination.

On the principle of beginning the story at home, the most ancient English literary product may be examined for its treatment of woman. So may light be thrown back upon the social life of the period prior to the Norman Conquest, and a background be furnished for the later and lovelier idealizations of the female type. Nor should the quest lack genuine æsthetic value and pleasure.

The rôle of woman in Old English poetry is comparatively a scant one. This is not to be wondered at when we consider the conditions of its creation, the life it represents. Feuds and internecine strifes claimed the main strength and interest of the Anglo-Saxons of the early Chris