22 Hartley Burr Alexander 



Lo, we shall laud Heaven-realm's Lord, 



The Maker's might and His mind's thought, 



The works of the Father ! Wonder with wonder, 



He, the Eternal, established a world! 



First for earth's children reared as a roof 



The high dome of Heaven — Holy Creator ! 



Made, then, the mid-earth — Warder of Men, 



Lord Everlasting! Thereafter the land, 



A fold for us, fitted — Father Almighty! 



In the one hymn the soul of the man leaps out into Nature, iden- 

 tifies itself with creation and the creative spirit; in the other, 

 the whole bent is to circumscribe and restrict man's sphere, recog- 

 nizing that his ways are limited and charted by the Power above. 

 To the heathen soul of Beowulf this power was Wyrd, fate, to the 

 gentler-minded Caedmon the God of the new religion; yet to 

 them both it was external to man, man-ruling. It is only the 

 Celts, a recent investigator tells us, who believed and taught in 

 myth that men had warred with and conquered gods, — perhaps 

 the crude and primitive expression of their indomitable conviction 

 that the divinity in man and Nature, at the last, are one, that 

 the human vision of beauty in the world is vision of Nature's 

 final truth. 



Nature awed the Saxon chiefly by her manifestation of 

 strength, — the terrifying sea! He felt the inevitability of the 

 dooms of the Norns, and thence arose his Hamlet-like sense 

 of human tragedy and of the final paltriness of the mere human 

 soul. Hamlet, indeed, is the typical Shakespearian embodiment 

 of the Teutonic spirit, just as Macbeth and Lear are Shakes- 

 peare's typical Celts. A similar contrast holds between Goe- 

 the's Faust and Marlowe's Faustus. On the one side is tragedy 

 of the idea pitilessly wrought out under inexorable fates ; on 

 the other is tumultuous rebellion against the fortune that proved 

 unconquerable. Fate and Fortune! the Teuton beholding in 

 Nature a mistress whose will he cannot overcome but whose 

 doomings he can endure with uncrushed lordliness of soul; the 

 Celt perceiving in her a Fortuna to be won by ardent wooings, to 

 be lost with cataclysmical despair. 



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