Then Aidan volunteered for the work, and led a religious colony to Lindisfarne, which is at low water a peninsula, at high water an island, nine miles to the southward of our present Berwick-upon-Tweed. At Lindisfarne, where Oswald founded for him a bishopric, Aidan formed the great missionary station for Northumbria. He gave his goods to the poor, travelled on foot among the people whom he sought to bring to Christ, and won their hearts by simple truth and self-denying earnestness. More Culdees passed through Lindisfarne to join the work, and thus the place came to be known as Holy Isle. For the next thirty years the Celts were in all this region spiritual teachers of the English, and it was out of the midst of this great North of England movement, in the newly-established monastery of Whitby, that the English heart sang through the verse of Cedmon its first great hymn based on the Word of Truth. 4. The Whitby monastery was founded by the Abbess Hilda, in the year 657. She then moved to it from the religious house at Hartlepool, over which she had presided, and into which she had received, two years before, Elfleda, the one-year-old daughter of King Oswald's brother and successor. In thanksgiving for a Victory, Elfleda's father had devoted the child to religious life. With a community of both sexes, bound less by formal ties than by a common wish to serve God and aid one another in His service while they diffused Christianity among the people, Hilda lived in the first simple abbey built on the high cliff at Whitby, maintained by a grant of surrounding lands. That which maintained her maintained also the poor about her. She had been taught by Aidan; had been for some years at Hartlepool much trusted, visited, and counselled by Aidan and other chief teachers of the Celtic Christians. Under her roof, in the year 664, when Whitby Abbey was but seven years old, there was held the Synod of Whitby, for settlement of the questions of ceremonial between the Celtic and the Roman Churches, and peace was secured by concession of the points upon which Rome insisted. At Whitby Hilda was as mother to the child-princess, who grew up under her care and became rexi abbess after her; was as mother in her little community, and among the rude people round about, who long preserved the belief that her form is at certain times to be seen in a vision of sunshine among the ruins of the later abbey built upon the site of hers. She so much encouraged the close study of Scripture that in her time many worthy servants of the Church and five I TO A.D. 62%] CÆDMON 17 bishops are said to have come out of her abbey. Afflicted during the last six years of her life, she never failed in any duty : and her last words to her people were that they should preserve the peace of the Gospel among themselves and with all others. At the time of her death, in 680, Cuthbert, who died in 686, was Bishop of Lindisfarne. He also left the mark of a true Christian's life among the people, and was remembered as an angelic missionary priest, who had deep sympathy for the neg lected poor. He would seek them in their most craggy and inaccessible homes, to dwell with them by the week or monththeir bishop and their brother. Such stir of human energies p:oduced a poet worthy of the time. All that we know of him was told by Bede, who was also a north countryman, and who was bern about the time when Cædmon's Paraphrase was written. 5. From Bede's account, without adopting its suggestion of miracle in the gift of song to the poet, we may infer that Cadmon was a tenant on some of the abbey lands at Whitby, and one of the converts who had a poet's nature stirred by Christian zeal. One day he joined a festive party at the house of some remoter neighbour of the country-side. The visitors came in on horseback and afoot, or in country cars, drawn some by horses and some by oxen. There was occasion for festivity that would last longer than a day. The draught cattle of the visitors were stabled, and would need watching of nights, since in wild times cattle-plunder also was a recreation, and one that joined business to pleasure. The visitors took turns by night in keeping watch over the stables. One evening when Cadmon sat with his companions over the ale-cup, and the song went round, his sense of song was keen, but, as a zealous Christian convert, he turned with repugnance from the battlestrains and heathen tales that were being chanted to the music of the rude harp which passed from hand to hand. As the harp came nearer to him he rose, since it was his turn that night to watch the cattle, and escaped into the stables. There, since we know by his work that he was true poet born, his train of thought doubtless continued till it led to a strong yearning for another form of song. If for these heathen hymns of war and rapine, knowledge and praise of God could be the glad theme of their household music, and if he, even he perhaps we may accept as a true dream the vision which Bede next tells as a miracle. Cadmon watched, slept, and in his sleep one came to him and said, "Cadmon sing." He said, “I cannot. I came hither out of [A.D. 657 the feast because I cannot sing." "But," answered the one who came to him, "you have to sing to me." "What," Cædmon asked, "ought I to sing?" And he answered, "Sing the origin of creatures." Having received which answer, Bede tells us, he began immediately to sing, in praise of God the Creator, verses of which this is the sense :-' "Now we ought to praise the Author of the Heavenly Kingdom, the power of the Creator and His counsel, the deeds of the Father of Glory: how He, though the eternal God, became the Author of all marvels; Omnipotent Guardian, who created for the sons of men, first Heaven for their roof, and then the Earth." "This," adds Bede, "is the sense but not the order of the words which he sang when sleeping." Cædmon remembered upon waking the few lines he had made in his sleep, and continued to make others like them. The vision seems to have been simply the dream-form given to a continuation of his waking thoughts; and Cædmon may well have believed, according to the simple faith of his time, that in his dream he had received a command from heaven. He went in the morning to the steward of the land he held under the abbey, and proposed to use his gift of song in aid of the work that was being done by Abbess Hilda and her companions. Hilda called him to her, up the great rock, and, to test his power, caused pieces of Scripture story to be told to him, then bade him go home and turn them into verse. He returned next day with the work so well done that his teachers became in turn his hearers. Hilda then coun selled him to give up his occupations as a layman, and received him with all his goods into the monastery. There sacred history was taught to him, that he might place the Word of God in pleasant song within their homes, and on their highways, and at festive gatherings, upon the lips of the surrounding people. He was himself taught by.religious men trained in the Celtic school, which was more closely allied to the Eastern than the Western Church. They knew and read the Chaldee Scriptures, and as their new brother began his work with the song of Genesis, the name they gave him in the monastery was the Chaldee name of the book of Genesis, derived from its first words, “In the beginning," that being in the Chaldee b'Cadmon. 6. Cædmon sang, in what is now called his Paraphrase, of the Creation, and with it of the War in Heaven, of the fall of Satan, and of his counsellings in Hell as the Strong Angel of Presumption. Thus Cædmon began, first in time and among the first in genius, the strain of English poetry: TO A.D. 680] CADMON'S PARAPHRASE "Most right it is that we praise with our words, He speeds the strong, and is the Head of all None formed Him, no first was nor last shall be Is everlasting over thrones in heaven." 19 Cadmon paints "The Angel of Presumption," yet in heaven, questioning whether he would serve God: "Wherefore,' he said, 'shall I toil? No need have I of master. I can work With my own hands great marvels, and have power Higher in heaven. Why shall I, for His smile, Stand by me, strong supporters, firm in strife. I am their master, and may rule this realm. And thus, to quote one passage more, Cædmon, a thousand years before the time of Milton, sang of Satan fallen : "Satan discoursed, he who henceforth ruled hell Spake sorrowing. God's Angel erst, he had shone white in heaven, Till his soul urged, and most of all its pride, Then said he, 'Most unlike this narrow place To that which once we knew, high in heaven's realm Which my Lord gave me, though therein no more For the Almighty we hold royalties. Yet right hath He not done in striking us Down to the fiery bottom of hot hell, Banished from heaven's kingdom, with decree That He will set in it the race of man. Worst of my sorrows this, that, wrought of earth, Adam shall sit in bliss on my strong throne; Cadmon, when he has thus told the story of Creation and the Fall of Man, follows the Scripture story to the Flood, and represents with simple words the rush of waters, and the ark "at large under the skies over the orb of ocean." So he goes on, picturing clearly to himself what with few words he pictures for his hearer. The story of Abraham proceeds to the triumph of his faith in God when he had led his son Isaac to the top of a high mount by the sea, "began to load the pile, awaken fire, and fettered the hands and feet of his child; then hove on the pile young Isaac, and then hastily gripped the sword by the hilt, would kill his son with his own hands, quench the fire with the youth's blood." From this scene of God's blessing on the perfect faith of Abraham, Cædmon proceeds next to the passage of the Red Sea by the Israelites, a story of the power of God, who is able to lead those who put their faith in Him unhurt through the midst of the great waters. And the next subject of the extant Paraphrase is taken from the book of Daniel, to show the same Power leading Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, with their garments unsinged, through the furnace fire. This paraphrase closes with Belshazzar's feast. The rest is from the New Testament, inscribed in the one extant manuscript less carefully, and by a later hand. It has for its subject Christ and Satan ; it is fragmentary, and perhaps no part of it is by Cadmon, except that which describes the fasting and temptation in the wilderness. 7. As to their mechanism, there is one measure for Beowulf, Cadmon's Paraphrase, and all subsequent First English poems. There is no rhyme, and no counting of syllables. The lines are short, depending upon accent for a rhythm varying in accordance with the thought to be expressed, and depending for its emphasis upon alliteration. Usually in the first of a pair of short lines the two words of chief importance began with the same letter, and in the second line of the pair the chief word began also with that letter, that is to say, if the alliteration were of consonants; in the case of vowels the rule was reversed, the chief words would begin with vowels that were different. 8. As to their matter, if we except Cædmon, in whom there was an artistic power perhaps to be accounted for by the beginning of some mixture of blood between the northern English and their Celtic fellow-citizens, the First English writers, whether of verse or prose, were wanting in vivacity of genius. They were practical, earnest, social, true to a high sense of duty, |