miration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame."

The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times by the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts, who then possessed England. In Erin, the first headquarters of song and story, even in the third century there was the poet with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of which he cut his verse; and there were degrees in literature. There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven fifties of historic tales; and there were others, down to the Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from the remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we find the profession of historian to be a recognized calling, transmitted in one family from generation to generation, and these later professors of history still bore the name of Ollamhs. Of the active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense of literature as an art, and of the Celt's delight in bright color, almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The delight in color is less manifest in the first poems of the Cymry. For them the one color was that of blood: they are of the sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels, who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus the Sicilian told, three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed tunics flowered with colors of every kind, trews, striped cloaks fastened with a brooch, and divided into many party-colored squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. In the old Gaelic tale of the "Tain Bo "men are described marching: "Some are with red cloaks; others with light-blue cloaks ; others with deep-blue cloaks; others with green, or gray, or white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. There is a young, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in the midst of them; a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast." Even the ghost of a Celt, if it dropped the substance, retained all the coloring of life. The vivacity of Celtic fancy is shown also by an outpouring of bold metaphor and effective simile:

"Both shoulders covered with his painted shield,
The hero there, swift as the war-horse, rushed.
Noise in the mount of slaughter, noise and fire:

The darting lances were as gleams of sun.
There the glad raven fed. The foe must fly
While he so swept them, as when in his course
An eagle strikes the morning dews aside,
And like a whelming billow struck their front.
Brave men, so say the bards, are dumb to slaves.
Spears wasted men; and ere the swan-white steeds
Trod the still grave that hushed the master voice,
His blood washed all his arms. Such was Buddvan,
Son of Bleed van the Bold."

Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English measure) of" Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic section of our people. The delight in music- among the old Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old Welsh Celts in the music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd

is another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of the Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid, and that the music of the Cymry was slower and more monotonous.

6. But what, we ask in the second place, are the qualities contributed to the common English stock by the Teutons? They were wanting in vivacity of genius. They were practical, earnest, social, true to a high sense of duty, and had faith in God. They used few similes, and, although their poetry is sometimes said to abound in metaphor, its metaphors were few and obvious. By metaphor a word is turned out of its natural sense. There is little of metaphor in calling the sea the waterstreet, the whale-road, or the swan-road; the ship, a wave-traverser, the sea-wood, or the floating-wood; a chief's retainers, his hearth-sharers; or night, the shadow-covering of creatures. This kind of poetical periphrasis abounds in First English poetry; but it proceeds from the thoughtful habit of realization, which extends also to a representation of the sense of words by some literal suggestion that will bring them quickened with a familiar experience or human association to the mind. There is in the unmixed English an imagination with deep roots and

little flower, solid stem and no luxuriance of foliage. That which it was in a poet's mind to say was realized first, and then uttered with a direct earnestness which carried every thought straight home to the apprehension of the listener. The descendants of those Frisians who did not cross to England resemble the First English before they had been quickened with a dash of Celtic blood. Both Dutch and English, when the seed of Christianity struck root among them, mastered the first conditions of a full development of its grand truths with the same solid earnestness, and carried their convictions out to the same practical result. Holland, indeed, has been, not less than England, a battle-ground of civil and religious liberty. The power of the English character, and therefore of the literature that expresses it, lies in this energetic sense of truth, and this firm habit of looking to the end. Christianity having been once accepted, aided as it was greatly in its first establishment among us by zeal of the Gael and Cymry, the First English writers fastened upon it, and throughout the whole subsequent history of our literature, varied and enlivened by the diverse blending of the races that joined in the forming of the nation, its religious energy has been the centre of its life.

CHAPTER II.

FIRST ENGLISH POETRY.

1. The Long Line of English Poets.-2. Cædmon.-3. His Paraphrase.-4. Beowulf.-5. Aldhelm.-6. Other Poets.-7. Mechanism of First English Verse.

1. We may think of all the poets that English literature has had during these twelve hundred years as a great host of men and women still marching in long procession, and still singing their songs to all who will listen. As our eyes move down the line, we catch sight of Chaucer, and Lydgate, and Sackville, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden, and Pope, and Burns, and Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley, and Elizabeth Browning, and Tennyson. It may well seem to us the most glorious army that ever marched; and it interests us to know that at the very head of it walks a man who lived as far off as the latter half of the seventh century, and who was of so lowly origin that he seemed to rise out of the earth, and to come to his great vocation of song, not by human training, but by inspiration of God. The name of the first poet in English literature is Cadmon.

2. It appears that, in the year 657, a holy woman, the Abbess Hilda, founded a monastery at Whitby, on one of the high cliffs of the coast of Yorkshire, looking off upon the North Sea. Among the tenants of the abbey lands near by was this humble person, Cadmon, quite inpocent of any knowledge of letters, already well advanced in years, but a devout convert from Paganism to the Christian faith, of which the new monastery was a beacon in all that dark neighborhood. One day he joined a festive party at the house of some remoter neighbor 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, cattleplunder 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 Cædmon 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 battle-strains 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. Cædmon watched, slept; and in his sleep one came to him and said, "Cadmon, sing." He said, "I cannot. I came hither out of the feast because I cannot sing.". 66 But," answered the one who came "What," Cadmon asked,

to him, "you have to sing to me.". "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." Cadmon 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 Cadmon 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