that "the introduction of Christianity was doubtless one of the causes that destroyed the productive power of epic poetry," while true in the abstract, must not be applied with strictness to Cadmon and Cynewulf; they were near enough the heroic day still to breathe its air. In the latter's Christ, a loosely constructed work of a choral-epic nature, which celebrates the Nativity, Ascension, and Day of Judgment, a single line gives an example of the imaginative touch, and conceives of nature as a vassal contributing her beauty to the glory of heaven. The seraphim who sing about the throne are described, and the poet sings:"Forever and ever, adorned with the sky, They worship the Wielder;"

power

the Wielder being God, who wields over all. The italicized clause embodies a conception which has a largeness reminding one of the work of a Michael Angelo. One thinks instinctively of Milton's scene:

"Where the bright seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, And the cherubic host in thousand quires Touch their immortal harps of golden wires." This brief passage from the Christ is nobly epic and large moving :

"Our food He gives us and joy of goods,

Weal o'er the wide ways and weather soft Under the skyey roof. The sun and moon, Best-born of stars, shine they for all of us, Candles of heaven for heroes on earth."

There is a sound of pantheism in this, and again comes the naïve stroke in the epithet "heroes" where "sinners" would be the conventional later word. It took centuries of masses and missals to make the Old Englishman admire the saint type more than the martial leader. Cynewulf's Andreas (now by the latest theory awarded to a follower rather than to himself) is a narrative poem which describes the delivery of Matthew from a Mermedonian prison by Andrew, who dwells in Achaia, and who therefore has to make a sea journey in faring on his quest of rescue. It is full of sea pictures,

and the color is that of the northeast coast of England, the singer's presumable home. In the passage following, the saint has been borne by angels to land, and left asleep on a highway near the Mermedonian city:

"Then flew the angels, forth again faring, Glad on the up-way their Home to seek, Leaving the holy one there on the highroad, Sleeping right peacefully under the heaven's heed,

Nigh to his foemen, all the night through.
Till that the Prince suffered day's candle
Sheerly to shine: the shades slunk away
Wan 'neath the welkin; then came the
weather's torch,

The brilliant heaven-light o'er the homes
beaming."

Here the thought is of light driving out darkness; it would have been more in the way of the heathen poet to give us the day swallowed up in the huge black maw of night. In the second line translated is an example of the constant perplexity of one who essays to turn Old English into more modern speech. I have retained the word "up-way" (like the German Aufgang) as it stands in the original, for it is certainly an admirably descriptive substantive for the airy path followed by the angelic messengers in flying back to heaven. One runs the danger of making either a bizarre effect or an obscure reading in such a case, the result being a frequent abandonment of the fine, strong, fresh Old English diction.

But not always did Cynewulf elect religious subjects; the series of remarkable Riddles, which rank among his best productions, are secular in subject, heathen in spirit, and full of the flavor of folk lore, myth, and northern melancholy. Yet there is a divergence from the oldest epic type the writer of these puzzlepoems has, after all, felt the amelioration of the new religion, and its influence may be traced in the lyrico-subjective position of the bard toward nature. Commingling with the feeling for the savagery of beast-kind is a certain spiritual good

fellowship which foretokens Coleridge, Byron, and Wordsworth. Beside the dark, battle-ravenous raven we see the bright, high-bred falcon associated with the aristocratic chase and the stately king hall. In Riddle Eight the swan is thus done in rapid crayon, for the reader's guessing :

"Silent my feather-robe when earth I tread, Fly o'er the villages, venture the sea; Whilom, this coat of mine and the lift lofty Heave me on high over the heroes' bight, And the wide welkin's strength beareth me

up

Over the folk; my winged adornments
Go whirring and humming, keen is their

song

When, freed of fetters, straightway I am A spirit that fareth o'er flood and field." Riddle Fifty-Eight limns a somewhat mysterious brown bird, the identification of which may perhaps be left most safely to Mr. Burroughs. Luckily, uncertainty as to name does not interfere with enjoyment of the brief, beautiful description:

"The lift upbeareth the little wights

Over the high hills: very black be they,
Swart, sallow-coated. Strong in their song,
Flockwise they fare, loud in their crying
Flit through the woody nesses, or, whiles, the
stately halls

Of mortal men. Their own names they
sound."

The hint in the final line suggests whippoor-will, Bob White, and other songsters, but the analogy is not carried out. In Old English verse nothing of the lyric or idyllic sort is more imaginative than the subjoined sketch of the nightingale, in the ninth Riddle; it has the interpretative quality removing it far from mere detail work:

"Many a tongue I speak by mine own mouth, In descants sing, pour out my lofty notes, Chanting so loud, hold fast my melody, Stay not my word, old even-singer, But bring to earls bliss in their towers, When for the dwellers there passioned I sing;

Hushed in the houses sit they and hark. How am I hight now, who with such scenic tunes

Zealously strive, calling to hero-men Many a welcome with my sweet voice?" We must make some requisition upon a long and remarkable passage from Cynewulf's allegorical poem, The Phoenix, a piece based upon the Latin, but much increased in volume and thoroughly Old English. The Phoenix is also an interesting example of the allegoric use of nature (here exemplified in the strange bird which names the composition) in the service of religious laudation. The bard uses a free hand in limning the praises of Paradise; and on the whole, the finest work of Cynewulf, and perhaps of Christian poetry, in the broad style, is embodied in the glowing and vibrant words and cadences. Notice the Old English conception of the Home of the Blessed as an island. The sense of this mid-earth as water-girdled which is common to the several Germanic literatures is blended in this case with that thought of England's ocean-fretted isle which made the greatest poet of the language see it imaginatively as a "precious stone set in the silver sea."

Stand greenly forth, as God has bidden,
The woods alike in winter and summer
Are hung with fruitings; never may wither
A leaf in the lift."

The faults of such descriptive writing are monotony, the repetition of stock phrases, the working over of the same thought. Nevertheless, it has a noble manner, and a charm of diction that makes for true poetry.

I hope the survey has now been wide enough to make the reader willing to believe that the treatment of nature in Old English poetry, in this its first manifestation, is something distinct, original, and of high poetic value. It affords a welcome insight into the mind and the imagination of our Saxon predecessors, and both by what it says and leaves unsaid yields interesting testimony with regard to their attitude toward the external world of terror, power, and beauty. That attitude was vastly different from our own, more limited in perception, less enlightened, gloomier in mood, registering a state of half-development. But it had fine and characteristic points about it the Old English imaginative vigor and grip, though largely sardonic; the creative impulse, though vibrant to coarser passions and childish on the subjective side; a poetic sense of the shifting gloom and glory of human life as voiced in nature or flashed forth in the bravery and loyalty of human kind; a pathetic appreciation of the dreams and

glories of religion; and a power over the mother tongue very impressive, making it to give forth grave chords of harmony to grief, to echo the wild joy of the elements, to shrill like clarions in the onset of weapons, or to soften in the mystic melodies of worship. It is manly poetry, and one cannot read it and fail to get a bracing of the mental sinews, and a larger sense of the essential qualities of his race in their ideal aspects and deeper workings. Although we may declare without hesitation that English literature is still to-day Germanic in its backbone and vitals, nevertheless it has been subjected to so much of outside and disparate influence that, compared with the literary product of the Old English time, it is a composite thing. Hence, in getting in touch with Beowulf or with some of the other early lyrics and ballads, we are going back to the originals, and are given a glimpse at the substructure whereupon is built the noble edifice of our many-towered and multi-ornamented literature. The Old English lyric (such a poem as The Scald's Lament, or The Seafarer) is the corner stone; Tennyson and Browning, Carlyle and Ruskin, Hawthorne and Longfellow, Emerson and Lowell, are the lofty terraces and gracious spires which pierce to heaven and catch the eye with rapture from afar, seeming unearthly in their aerial splendor, their proportioned and thoughtful majesty.

nest-building and raising a family. He has no reason to skulk, and though always a shy bird, he is no more so than several others, and in no sense is he a mystery.

There is, however, one American bird for whom Wordsworth's verse might have been written; one whose chief aim seems to be, reversing our grandmothers' rule for little people, to be heard, and not seen. To be seen is, with this peculiar fellow, a misfortune, an accident, which he avoids with great care, while his voice rings out loud and clear above all others in the shrubbery. I refer to the yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens), whose summer home is the warmer temperate regions of our country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and whose unbirdlike utterances prepare one to believe the stories told of his eccentric actions; this, for example, by Dr. Abbott:

"Aloft in the sunny air he springs;

I first knew the chat-if one may be said to know a creature so shy-in a pleasant corner of Colorado, a small, deserted park at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. I became familiar with his various calls and cries (one can hardly call them songs); I secured one or two fleeting glimpses of his graceful form; I sought and discovered the nest, which thereupon my Lady Chat promptly abandoned, though I had not laid a finger upon it; and last of all, I had the sorrow and shame of knowing that my curiosity had driven the pair from the neighbor hood. This was the Western form of Icteria, differing from the Eastern only in a greater length of tail, which several of our Rocky Mountain birds affect, for

the purpose, apparently, of puzzling the ornithologist.

Two years after my unsuccessful attempt to cultivate friendly relations with the "ghostly chat," the middle of May found me on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, where I settled myself at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, at that point bare, gray, and unattractive, showing miles of loose boulders and great patches of sagebush. In the monotonous stretches of this shrub, each plant of which looks exactly like every other, dwelt many shy birds, as well hidden as bobolinks in the meadow grass, or meadow larks in the alfalfa.

But on this mountain side no friendly cover existed from which I could spy out bird secrets. Whatever my position and wherever I placed myself, I was as conspicuous as a tower in the middle of a plain; again, no shadow of protection was there from the too ardent sun of Utah, which drew the vitality from my frame as it did the color from my gown; worse than these, the everywhere present rocks were the chosen haunts of the one enemy of a peaceful bird lover, the rattlesnake, and I hesitated to pursue the bird because I invariably forgot to watch and listen for the reptile. Bird study under these conditions was impossible, but the place presented a phase of nature unfamiliar to me, and for a time so fascinating that every morning my steps turned of themselves "up the stony pathway to the hills."

The companion of my walks, a fellow bird student, was more than fascinated; she was enraptured. The odorous bush had associations for her; she reveled in it; she inhaled its fragrance as a delicious perfume; she filled her pockets with it; she lay for hours at a time on the ground, where she could bask in the sunshine, and see nothing but the gray leaves around her and the blue sky above.

I can hardly tell what was the fascination for me. It was certainly not the

view of the mountains, though mountains are beyond words in my affections. The truth is, the Rocky Mountains, many of them, need a certain distance to make them either picturesque or dignified. The range then daily before our eyes, the Wasatch, was, to dwellers at its feet, bleak, monotonous, and hopelessly prosaic. The lowest foothills, being near, hid the taller peaks, as a penny before the eye will hide a whole landscape.

Let me not, however, be unjust to the mountains I love. There is a range which satisfies my soul, and will rest in my memory forever, a beautiful picture, or rather a whole gallery of pictures. I can shut my eyes and see it at this moment, as I have seen it a thousand times. In the early morning, when the level sun shines on its face, it is like one continuous mountain reaching across the whole western horizon; it has a broken and beautiful sky line; Pike's Peak looms up toward the middle, and lovely Cheyenne ends it in graceful slope on the south; lights and shadows play over it; its colors change with the changing sky or atmosphere, - sometimes blue as the heavens, sometimes misty as a dream; it is wonderfully beautiful then. But wait till the sun gets higher; look again at noon, or a little later. Behold the whole range has sprung into life, separated into individuals: gorges are cut where none had appeared; chasms come to light; cañons and all sorts of divisions are seen; foothills move forward to their proper places, and taller peaks turn at angles to each other; shapes and colors that one never suspected come out in the picture: the transformation is marvelous. But the sun moves on, the magical moment passes, each mountain slips back into line, and behold, you see again the morning's pic

ture.

Indulge me one moment, while I try to show you the last picture impressed upon my memory, as the train bore me, unwilling, away. It was cloudy, a storm It was cloudy, a storm

was coming up, and the whole range was in deep shadow, when suddenly through some rift in the clouds a burst of sunshine fell upon the "beloved mountain' Cheyenne, and upon it alone. In a moment it was a smiling picture, "glad

With light as with a garment it was clad;" all its inequalities, its divisions, its irregularities emphasized, its greens turned greener, its reds made more glowing, an unequaled gem for a parting gift.

To come back to Utah. One morning, on our way up to the heights, as we were passing a clump of oak brush, a bird cry rang out. The voice was loud and clear, and the notes were of a peculiar character: first a "chack" two or three times repeated, then subdued barks like those of a distressed puppy, followed by hoarse "mews" and other sounds suggesting almost any creature rather than one in feathers. But with delight I recognized the chat; my enthusiasm instantly revived. I unfolded my camp chair, placed myself against a stone wall on the opposite side of the road, and became silent and motionless as the wall itself.

My comrade, on the contrary, as was her custom, proceeded with equal promptness to follow the bird up, to hunt him out. She slipped between the barbed wires which, quite unnecessarily, one would suppose, defended the bleak pasture from outside encroachment, and passed out of sight down an obscure path that led into the brush where the bird

was hidden. Though our ways differ, or rather, perhaps, because our ways differ, we are able to study in company. Certainly this circumstance proved available in circumventing the wily chat, and that happened which had happened before: in fleeing from one who made herself obvious to him, he presented himself, an unsuspecting victim, to another who sat like a statue against the wall. To avoid his pursuer, the bird slipped through the thick foliage of the low