1 6 Hartley Burr Alexander 



the in-dwellers : the homely tenderness so winsome in the German, 

 more and more giving place to the " mind-fettered " mood of a 

 race made dumb with its striving. 



For Gothic fatalism was never passive ; it was always the 

 Northern way to greet fated doom full-panoplied, warring to the 

 last, — in the mood which Henley's Invictus has modernized for 

 us. And so it is that the second great characteristic of our fore- 

 fathers' poetry — battle and energy — springs from their passion 

 for putting forth strong effort. They seem to have fought more 

 for the berserk joy of it than for plunder-pleasure or glory, — at 

 least their poetry reads so. I have already quoted one grim 

 passage, the weaponless rending of a foe, here no monstrous 

 Grendel, but a man. It is unnecessary to multiply examples, yet 

 I might call to mind that vivid figure in the Finnsburg fragment : 

 " the sword-flame stood such as all Finnsberg were afire." It 

 may be pedantic to italicize " stood " ; but it seems to me that 

 this metaphor holds the very soul of the race's force: the simile 

 gives the heat of the fight vividly enough, but it must needs be 

 made superlative in metaphor — for it is only the intensest of 

 flames that stand. 



But there is yet a third characteristic, religion and the serious 

 mood of men who see life, as Milton saw it, in its cosmic setting. 

 Bede tells us how, when the men of Northumbria gathered to 

 debate the adoption of the Christian faith in place of their an- 

 cestral paganism, an old earl gave rede in a speech which wonder- 

 fully preserves for us the higher mood. I quote Green's render- 

 ing: "So seems the life of man, O king, as a sparrow's flight 

 through the hall when you are sitting at meat in winter-tide, with 

 the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the icy rain-storm with- 

 out. The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment 

 in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from 

 the other vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it came. So 

 tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight, but what is 

 before it, what after it, we know not. If this new teaching tells 

 aught certainly of these, let us follow it." And it was only after 

 the adoption of Christianity that the Anglo-Saxon imagination 

 attained its full dominion. Then it was that Caedmon sang his 



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