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Queen) of women loveliest to me: all the great hall roof with her hands she drew down. The hall began to tumble, and I fell to the ground, so that my right arm broke. Then said Modred, Take that! Adown fell the hall and Walwain also fell, and lay on the earth; both his arms broke. I grasped my dear sword with my left hand, and smote off Modred's head, that it rolled on the field; and the queen I cut all to pieces with my dear sword, and then I set her down in a black pit. And all my great people set to flight, that I wist not under Christ where they were gone. But myself I found to stand upon a wold, and then I wandered wide over the moors. There I saw gripes (griffons) and grisly birds. Then came a golden lion to glide over the down, a beast very handsome that our Lord made. The lion ran forward to me, and took me by the middle, and began to move herself forth and went to the sea. And I saw the waves in the sea drive; and the lion went in the flood with myself. When we came into the sea, the waves took her from me. A fish came there to glide and brought me to land. Then was I all wet and weary from sorrow and sick. When I awoke and began to quake greatly; then began I to tremble as if I burned with fire. And so I had all night of my dream much thought, for I wot to certainty my bliss is all gone; throughout my life sorrow I must endure. Welaway! alas! that I have not here Wenhever, my queen!

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HE early history of the Germans is chaotic. The struggles of the tribes, first with the Romans, and afterwards with one another; the continual inflowing of the barbaric tide from the east, and its eddies and currents to and fro in the

great basin of Europe; its reckless ignorance, and its savage instinct to destroy all monuments of art and culture; its vast, blind, irresistible, irresponsible force, as of something natural and God-driven-all remind the spectator of the irruption of a flood into some hitherto protected region, swirling, expunging, submerging, aimlessly tossing upon its muddy waves the flotsam and jetsam of all that had been precious and beautiful; roaring, and deepening, and selfconflicting, till all the world seems turning into a wanton and meaningless welter of barren and windy surges. But at length, the waters find their boundaries, the shores assume permanence and character, the turbid flood becomes a lake, clear and calm, harmonious with the landscape and lending it a new beauty. It sparkles in the sunshine, and glimmers beneath the moon, and heaven is reflected in it. All that had been threatening, hostile and terrible has become friendly, civilizing and beneficent.

The obscurity of the first ages after Rome is hardly worth penetrating, were the means of doing it available. The end of the old order, and the beginning of the new, are never fair to

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contemplate. Goths and Vandals, Franks and Huns, Gauls and Saxons, trampling on the corpse of murdered antiquity, grappled fiercely at one another's throats; they knew not where they were, nor wherefore they had come; the past was dark, the future blank; was the undefined impulse which had brought them thus far to urge them further yet? But from the outer borders of invasion rumor ran that the ocean had been reached, and that the mysterious migration had found its bourne. Here must the roaming myriads find their home.

For centuries there was not, nor could there be, any literature or cultivated arts. There was no harmony in the life, and the mind could mirror none. The strong must master the weak, and settle rivalries between each other; the weak must find subsistence, or perish. The confused rabble of paganism and superstition must endure the strange light of Christianity, and resolve itself accordingly. The constitutional incompatibility between the Latin and the Teutonic genius must have time to adjust itself, whether chemically or mechanically. An infant civilization, unlike any preceding one, must be born, and space and season for it to get on its legs and walk must be accorded. All the old ideals must be changed for new; the voice of the old oracles must yield to counsels till now unimagined. It is no marvel that for six hundred years after the Roman Empire fell, no literary monument-with two or three notable exceptions-arose amidst the waste to witness of the survival of the constructive and creative faculty in human nature. Not until the twelfth century did any sustained literary movement begin among the Germanic nations.

But the oases in this desert are worth recording. The difficulties which beset Bishop Ulfilas (or Wulfilas), when in the middle of the fourth century he undertook the translation of the Bible into Gothic, were similar to those experienced by our own Apostle Eliot, when he set out to do a like service for the American Indians in 1661. Like Eliot, Ulfilas had to invent a medium in which to write; unlike Eliot, he had almost to create a language to be written. One advantage over Eliot he had-he was writing for a coming race, while

Eliot wrote for one that was soon to vanish. But the obsta cles were stupendous, and the merit of this primitive churchman's achievement canuot be too much honored. In 360 A.D., the Gothic tongue was in an inchoate condition, but Ulfilas, looking about him, found Gothic runes and Greek letters, and from the two made his alphabetic characters. His life had not been an undisturbed one; he had embraced the Arian heresy, and was persecuted and driven hither and thither by the zeal of the orthodox. His parents were Cappadocian Christians; he was consecrated bishop at Antioch in 341, being then thirty years of age, and was assigned to the Arian Visigoths, who lived north of the lower Danube. But after seven years he was expelled from this region, and, with the consent of Constantius, emigrated to Moesia (now Bulgaria), with his people. It was here, probably, that he accomplished his translation, after years of labor. Meanwhile he attended to the duties of his calling, preaching in Latin, Greek and Gothic. At the age of seventy he traveled to Constantinople to defend the Arian doctrines, and there death overtook him. A more reverend and remarkable figure does not belong to this epoch, and no worthier subject for poetry or romance could be desired. Of his great work, which practically created a language, to speak nothing of its other benefits, most of the Gospels and fragments of the Old Testament survive. The intellectual solitude of the man and of his achievement is strange and impressive. He was the first, and for centuries to come he was the last, to put Gothic words on parchment and gather them in a book. There was no other mind to catch fire from his, and carry on the inspiration. Yet ages after his toil-worn body was dust, his gift to religion and civilization was recognized, and homage done to his faith and genius.

Books, after Ulfilas, there were for a long time none; but the people had their voice, which uttered itself in songs of war and of warriors, sung with applause by minstrels, of which the best were remembered and sung again. The Christian monks, who alone possessed the scribe's art, would not record such unchristian productions, nor would they help to prolong the dying throes of paganism by writing down the remnants

of mythology which still circulated from mouth to mouth. But paganism, so far as its scenery and dramatis persona were concerned, was not dying; nor is it in these respects dead to-day. The Gothic imagination needs its giants, dwarfs, kobolds, gnomes, White Women, heroes and heroines, witches and magicians; it engenders them spontaneously, and never relinquishes the legends and traditions in which they are preserved. Substantially the same tales that grown folk told one another twelve hundred years ago in central Europe are told by nurses to children all over the civilized world in these closing years of the century; and yet they remained unwritten for ages upon ages; and, indeed, had probably already survived countless generations of war, defeat, conquest, emigration, and vicissitude of all kinds, ever since the first Aryan adventurers turned their faces westward four thousand years ago. Nothing else has such vitality as these romantic, heroic, mysterious, homely conceptions, handed about among the common people, who can neither read nor write, but feel touched by simple, elemental things, and never forget them. The German folk-lore-Grimm's Fairy Talesof our era were the religious dogmas of pre-historic Asia, and may be found in the Eddas and Nibelungenlieds of the Dark Ages. They need no scribes to keep them alive; the principle of life is inextinguishable in them.

Precisely what these "ancient barbarous poems" were, we know not; for, although Charlemagne in the ninth century had made a collection of them, this was afterwards lost. One ballad remains from the latter part of the eighth century; this is known as the "Hildebrandslied;" the verse is alliterative, and the subject is the combat between Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand. The copy we have is doubtless a comparatively late version of the original tale, which refers to the period of Dietrich von Bern (it was thus that the Goths pronounced Theodoric of Verona, surnamed The Great). He was born in 454 A.D., and died in 526, and became the hero of all manner of extravagant fables, and the central figure of a cycle of romances. The Hildebrandslied is as rough as the blows of a hammer on the anvil, but it has power and some dramatic quality.

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