swiftly; I know not how long I can continue. My Maker may soon take me away." The night was passed in thanksgiving, and on Wednesday he bid them write with speed what he had begun. "Most dear Master," said one, "there is still one chapter wanting, does it trouble you to be asked more questions?"-"It is no trouble," he answered. "Take your pen, make ready and write fast." Which he did, but at the ninth hour he said to me, "I have some little things of value in my chest, such as pepper, napkins, and incense; run quickly and bring the priests of our monastery that I may distribute among them the gifts which God has given me." Then he passed the day "joyfully till the evening, and the boy who wrote for him said, 'Dear Master, there is yet one sentence unwritten.' He answered, 'Write quickly.' Soon after the boy said, 'The sentence is now written.' And he replied, 'It is well; you have said the truth. It is ended. Take my head into your hands, for I am well satisfied to sit facing my holy place, where I was wont to pray.' And thus on the pavement of his little cell, singing,Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost,' when he had named the Holy Ghost, he breathed his last, and so departed to the kingdom of Heaven." So passed away, as quietly as he had lived, the "Light of the Church," the "Father of English learning."1

While he was yet alive, a new school of poetry, other than the Caedmonic school which he had celebrated, had begun; and soon grew steadily. It lasted fully fifty years after his death; until that fatal time when Jarrow and Wearmouth where he had worked, and Lindisfarne which he had loved, were harried by the heathen men. It is this new school and its labours which now call us back from the prose writers to the poets, from the literature in England of a foreign tongue to a literature in our own language.

1 They wrote an epitaph for him—

Presbyter hic Baeda requiescit carne sepultus;

Dona, Christe, animam in caelis gaudere per aevum;
Daque illi sophiae debriari fonte, cui jam

Suspiravit ovans, intento semper amore.

I have placed these bad verses here that I may quote the indignant criticism which William of Malmesbury, with all the humorous haughtiness of a scholar, makes upon them. Moreover, his criticism shows how rapidly scholarship, beyond York, decayed in Northumbria. "They are contemptible," he says, and adds, when he has quoted them, "Is it possible to thin down by any excuse the disgrace, that there was not to be found, even in that monastery where, during his lifetime the school of all learning had flourished, a single person who could write his epitaph, save in this mean and paltry style? But enough of this; I will return to my subject."— Chron., Bk. i. 3.

CHAPTER XXII

THE DISCOURSE OF THE SOUL TO THE BODY AND THE ELEGIAC POEMS

THE characteristic of the Caedmon cycle of poems is the absence of self-consciousness; the personality of the poet does not appear in Genesis, Exodus, or Daniel, in the Christ and Satan, or in Judith. It is true that in Genesis B a good deal of subtle drawing of character exists - as subtle, that is, as the age permitted, but this part of the poem is said to be much later than the death of Baeda. Yet, even here, the writer is not concerned with himself, his own sorrows, or his salvation.

It is quite different with a class of poems which began to rise about, I think, the beginning of the eighth century. These poems are concerned with personal fates, and with the emotions these fates awaken; with the personal relation of the soul to God and its eternal state; and many of them are written with the eye of the writer fixed on his own heart and its imaginations. Baeda's death-lay is a short piece which represents a whole class of poetical prayers wrung forth by the passion of the soul for redemption; and this class of poem now continued to be composed by the English. Every one of them worth calling poetry is steeped in personal feeling. This subjective drift of poetry is especially marked in Cynewulf. All the poems which he has signed with his name, however far the story he tells in them be impersonal, contain, either in their midst or at the end, a short or long passage which is entirely taken up with his own feelings. Even the Riddles may begin and close with a personal representation; and the things concerning which he riddles are personified with a force which proves how deeply he was penetrated with this individual manner of thinking and feeling.

The poems discussed in this chapter are, I think, earlier than Cynewulf's work, somewhat earlier even than the Riddles. Four of them belong to the earthly fates of men, and one to their spiritual fate. This one poem is called the Discourse of

the Soul to its Body. The other four are the Elegies, and I think I may claim that term for them; at least in its earlier sense among the Greeks. Three of them are laments, and one is a longing cry of love.

The Discourse of the Soul to its Body exists in full as a double poem. The first is the speech of a lost soul to its corpse; the second of a saved soul to its body. The first is found in the Exeter and also in the Vercelli book; the second a fragment without an end is only in the Vercelli book, and the first is as good as the second is poor work. So distinct is their power, though their motives are similar, that I am inclined to guess that the second was written some time after the first, in order to complete the representation of the subject, and by another poet; and if this be the case, it might explain why the second poem does not appear in the Exeter book. Moreover, the second poem stands alone. The first was frequently imitated, the second never. "No poem of a similar kind," says Hammerich, "in which a pious soul speaks with its body is found in any other literature." We may conjecture then, since the one was imitated and the other not, that the first poem originally stood alone, and the second was afterwards added, perhaps by Cynewulf himself. It is not worth while perhaps to make this suggestion, but unless it is made, I cannot express my opinion that the first verses may be as early as the beginning of the eighth century. I give this date with diffidence, because I am conscious of expressions and of a certain manner in various parts of the poem which seem to belong to a later time, and so much so, that even if the suggestion be not true, I must still hold that the poem was edited with additions at a later period. Nevertheless, the lines I subjoin seem to mark the year in which it was written.

Then shall come the spirit,
After seven nights

crying out with sorrows! shall the soul draw near to find Always its own body (once long time it bore it) For three hundred winters; if the King of nations, If Almighty God earlier will not work

Of this world the end.

1. 9.

The spirit, when seven nights have passed, will, every night for 300 years, visit the corpse it once inhabited. Why 300 years? The answer is, I conjecture, that it was the general expectation at this time that the end of the world would come in the year 1000. If the poet was thinking of this, the date of the poem would be about the year 700; and that he was thinking of this appears more probable from his phrase, "un

less it be the will of Almighty God to bring the world to an end sooner than in 300 years.' Some literary questions concerning Anglo-Saxon poetry would be made clearer if this meaning of the verses should prove to be justifiable.

"Cold is the voice of the Spirit and grimly it calls to the corpse, 'O gory dust! why didst thou vex me? O foulness, all rotted by the earth; O likeness of the clay! God sent me into thee, I could not leave thee; thy sinful lusts pressed me down, it seemed to me 30,000 winters till thy death-day! Thou wert rich in food, sated with wine; I was thirsty for God's body, for the drink of the Spirit. Shame shalt thou bear in the great Day. Thou art dearer now to none than the swart raven. Thou hast no goods, only thy naked bones; thy joys are nothing, but by night I must seek thee again and again, and at cock-crowing go away. Better, on the day thou shalt give account, hadst thou been born a bird, a fish, the fiercest of serpents than a man. Wroth will the Lord be at

that Doom-tide. And what shall we two do?'"

This is the abstract of the speech, and it has its own special quality. Then the poet describes the spirit's departure, and the silence of the body. It cannot speak; it is altogether riven asunder and plundered by the worms. One of them leads the way into the body for the rest, and this is the sole piece of creative imagination in the poem

119. Gifer is he hight, (grim that Worm is,)

Sharper than the needle
First of all he drives
Tears the tongue asunder:
From above, into the head,
Works for other worms
To their wealthy banquet!

are the jaws of him.
into the Earth-grave,

through the teeth he pierces;
eats he through the eyes;

way unto their food,

This King, this Captain of the Worms, Gifer, venomous Greed, piercing his way for the rest through the head into the corpse, is worthy of Ezekiel.

There are four Elegies full of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry; these are the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wife's Complaint, and the Husband's Message. To these we may add the Ruin, though it is not sufficiently personal in its passion to come easily within the proper circle of the Elegy. I have already translated the Ruin. Its motive-the sorrow for departed splendour and happiness awakened by the sight of a town long since desolate, with its fortress and market-hall crumbling in the midst of it; the recalling of the joyous life that once was there, and the imaging, through its death, of the passing away

of all the world is a common motive.

The Rhyming Poem seems to take it up. It is reproduced in some of Cynewulf's longer poems. It appears in the midst of one of these four Elegies, in the Wanderer; and the passage is so like certain lines in the Ruin that it almost seems to be suggested, if not copied, from the Ruin, or the passage in the Ruin from it.

This was a motive which lay continually before the eyes of men in Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria during the long series of petty wars of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. The subject alone cannot then date these elegiac poems. But when we consider the elements in them which distinguish them from other Anglo-Saxon poems of the eighth century, and at the same time keep our eye fixed on the history of that century in Northumbria, I think we may make a probable conjecture as to their date.

The internal evidence of the Wanderer, the Wife's Complaint, and the Husband's Message points to their having been written in a time of disturbance, when not only the halls of nobles were desolated, but when exile was common. The wife talks of her husband driven from his folk and refuging in a far-off land. The message of the husband comes from a foreign country to England. She is to join him in his exile where he has made a home. The wanderer has fled from England, and sees the vision of his ruined happiness and of his slaughtered friends. This state of things would suit with the condition of England after the coming of the Northmen. But there is no allusion to the Danes in the poems, and there was no literature in Northumbria in the ninth century. It would also suit with the time of anarchy in Northumbria after the resignation of Eadberht in 758, to which period we may refer the passages in Cynewulf's poems which sorrowfully remember happier days. But I do not feel as if these elegies belonged to the latter part of the eighth century, and my reason is first, that they have a certain pagan element which has wholly disappeared from the poems which belong to the Cynewulf cycle; and secondly, that the sorrow expressed is not a retrospective sorrow, like Cynewulf's, for the decay of the whole land, but a personal and present pain. We might fairly find such a time in that parenthesis of bad government and of national tumult which filled the years between the death of Aldfrith in 705 and the renewed peace of Northumbria under Ceolwulf in the years that followed 729.

The pagan quality, or rather the absence of any Christian element in these poems, is remarkable. There is not a trace