38 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



formed it into songs so beautiful that all who heard were 

 delighted." 



As his poetical faculty became more developed, his pro- 

 foundly original genius became more marked, and his 

 inspiration more earnest and impassioned. It was this 

 Northumbrian cowherd, transformed into a monk of 

 Whitby, who sang before the abbess Hilda the revolt of 

 Satan and Paradise Lost, a thousand years earlier than 

 Milton, in verses which may still be admired even beside 

 the immortal poem of the British Homer. So remarkable, 

 indeed, in some instances is the similarity in the produc- 

 tions of the two poets that F. Palgrave, one of the most 

 competent of English critics, does not hesitate to declare 

 that certain of Caedmon's verses resembled so closely cer- 

 tain passages of the Paradise Lost that some of Milton's 

 lines seem almost like a translation from the work of his 

 distinguished predecessor. And M. Taine, in his History 

 of English Literature, referring to the "string of short, 

 accumulated, passionate images, like a succession of light- 

 ning flashes," of the old Anglo-Saxon poet, asserts that 

 " Milton's Satan exists in Caedmon's as the picture exists 

 in the sketch." 1 



Well could Caedmon's first biographer, the Venerable 

 Bede, say of him, ' ' Many Englishmen after him have tried 

 to compose religious poems, but no one has ever equaled the 

 man who had only God for a master." And not without 

 warrant does the eloquent Montalembert, in the masterly 

 work just quoted, pen the following statement: "Apart 

 from the interest which attaches to Caadmon from a his- 

 torical and literary point of view, his life discloses to us 

 essential peculiarities in the outward organization and 

 intellectual life of those great communities which in the 

 seventh century studded the coast of Northumbria, and 

 which, with all their numerous dependents, found often a 

 more complete development under the crozier of such a 



iVol. I, pp. 46 and 49, New York, 1871. 



