PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1069 
steady consistency of natural character—that clinging through all 
difficulty to the aim in view—that unrelenting curiosity—that 
desire to better what has been done * * * which * * * 
powers enable art to strive, to seek, and at last to reach its goal. 
“Moreover no national art is good which is not plainly that 
nation’s own. In this Anglo-Saxon poetry * * * we grasp 
most closely the dominant English essence. The poetry of England 
has owed much to the different races which mingled with the 
original English race ; it has owed much to the different types 
of poetry it absorbed—-Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian, 
Spanish ; but, below all these admixtures, the English nature 
wrought its steady will. It seized, it transmuted, it modified, it 
mastered these admixtures both of race and song.” 
To a nation which recalls with pride its long roll of heroic 
seamen, it is a source of the keenest pleasure to find that the 
early Northumbrian poetry has for its constant theme the ocean. 
The sea in all its moods—its joys, its perils, its heroes,—is the 
stage upon which the characters of early English poets play their 
parts. The winds, the billows, the rocks, the ocean caves, the 
monsters of the deep, are all familar subjects. 
Of Beowulf, the earliest specimen of English poetry, it has 
been said : 
“The background of all the action is the great deep—the 
chorus, as it were, of this story of the fates of men. Thus, 
the ocean life, the ocean mystery, the battle with the ocean, and 
on the ocean, began the English poetry ; and they are as vivid in 
it now as they were in the youth of our people. Zhe Battle of 
the Baltic, The Fight of the Revenge, The Sailor Boy, Hervé Riel, 
Swinburne’s Sea-songs, a hundred ballads, taste of the same brine 
and foam which the winds drove in the faces of the men who 
wrote Beowulf, The Seafarer, and The Riddles which concern the 
sea. Nay, more, the very temper of mind which pervades modern 
poetry of the sea—a mingling of melancholy and exaltation—is 
to be found in English poetry before the Conquest ; and strange 
to say it is not found again, except in scattered ballads, till we 
reach our own century. 
“There is in Beowulf no trace of any dread of the sea, even in 
its worst moods, nor do the men complain of the labours of the 
ocean, or of its icy weathers.” 
As Sidonius says of the pirate Saxons :--“ They know the 
dangers of the ocean as men who are every day in touch with them. 
In the midst of tempests, and skirting the sea-beaten rocks, they 
risk their attack with joy, hoping to make profit out of the very 
storm.” 
Although usually regarded as a simple matter, it is, in fact, a 
most difficult task to determine when the English language, in its 
modern form, really commenced. The language of the Anglo- 
