The English Lyric 1 5 



for the compassless, restless rover from the North. Spaciousness 

 was " sea-gaping " ; thoughts were " mind-fettered " ; the skull was 

 a " bone-helm " and had need of being serviceable. It was the 

 language of men of a temper not to be toyed with, a temper of 

 Gothic gloom, contemptuously defiant of death. Browning, of 

 our modern poets, perhaps best catches the masterfulness of the 

 old imagery : Shelley " Sun-Treader " ; " Spring's arrowy sum- 

 mons " ; the " year's snow bound about for a breast-plate " ; — in- 

 stances out of a multitude. 



In all Anglo-Saxon poetry three themes seem most native and 

 natural, three features most characteristic. There is the sea and 

 fate, there is battle and energy, there is religion and the grim 

 seriousness of life. 



No illustration better typifies the first of these than the story 

 of Scyld. A babe and alone, he sailed from an unknown port 

 to be borne at the will of the waves to the people who were to 

 make him theirs. Among them he grew up to kingship and ruled 

 long in glory of prowess and wisdom. When at last he came to 

 die the thanes he had gathered about him, in " mourning mood," 

 laid his gold-adorned body, in the midst of kingly gear, beneath 

 his kingly banner, nigh the mast of his viking ship, " ice-bright 

 and out-eager," and freeing the ship from her mooring, yielded 

 him up once again to the will of wind and wave. It was rever- 

 ential propitiation wrought by the spell of the sea, by that awed 

 sense of the sea's fatefulness and dooming which Pierre Loti 

 brings home to us in his Pechcur d'Islandc. Of all natural 

 majesties none seems greater than the ocean's Titanism ; the 

 human heart is abashed before it and it beats upon the imagina- 

 tion with pitiless insistence. The restless regularity of wave and 

 tide, the mighty heavings up and strong subsidences of waters, 

 infinitely various yet infinitely monotonous, — these overwhelm 

 with a sense of on-riding destinies. So in the gray North, beside 

 the boundless haunt of fog-veiled death, the waves hewed the 

 human mind to its conception of Fate, Wyrd, giving it something 

 of the hardness of granite brunting the sea, together with granite 

 abidance of destined ends. From this hardening influence of 

 the ocean comes the distinction of the sea-faring Teutons from 



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