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Fastens the death-flame! on all fowls and beasts,

Fire-swart or raging warrior, rushes conflagration
All the earth along." 16

For the general organism of this part of his poem, Cynewulf is indebted to various sources - to Bede, to Gregory, to Augustine, to Prudentius, to Ephraem Syrus, to the Apocrypha-but the whole is moulded or rather fused by his imaginative power into a poem of the greatest moral fervour, intensity, and vividness. The scenes described are realised with start

ling clearness. The speeches are majestic and yet tender, pathetic and yet awful.

The final address of Christ to the good and evil, to the just and the unjust, repeating the whole story of the Fall, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, is full of quick personal appeals, as if Jesus were speaking to one only out of the vast host gathered to judgment.

There is one specially effective passage on the theme of the Holy Rood. It is a variant on the story of the vision of Constantine, as told by Eusebius, a story which we know to have been familiar to Cynewulf by his direct allusion to it in the "Elene." 17

A mighty blood-red cross is pictured with its foot standing on the Hill of Zion, rising till its top reaches the sky. All the hosts of heaven, angels and men, gaze upon it. By its ruddy light all things are seen. The sun is gone. It shines instead of the sun. It is the brightest of all beacons. All the shadows are scattered by its brilliancy. From head to foot it is red, wet with the blood of the King of Heaven.

The good see it and it brings brightness to their souls. The evil see it for their torment and their doom. And in the ruddy light, Christ, like a Roman preacher to the crucifix, turns to the mighty Rood, points to Himself hanging there, and, "speaking as if He spake to one and yet did mean all sinful folk," exclaims:

"Lo, man, with my own hands I fashioned thee

In the beginning, and wisdom granted thee;

I formed thy limbs of clay; I gave thee living soul;
I honoured thee o'er all created things; I wrought

Thine aspect like to mine; I gave thee might,

And wealth o'er each wide land; of woe thou knewest nought,

Nought of the woe to come; yet thankless thou ..

Thou wouldst not fulfil the Word of Life

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But, at the word of thy Bane, didst break my bidding,
A treacherous foe, a mischievous destroyer,

Didst thou obey rather than thy Creator.

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See now the deadly wounds they made of yore
Upon my hands and e'en upon my feet . . .
The gory wound, the gash upon my side.
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O how uneven between us two the reckoning!

Wherefore didst thou forsake the beauteous life
Which graciously I bought for thee through love.

Give me back my life for which in martyrdom
I gave thee my own. For that sore death of mine
I claim the life thou hast so sinfully destroyed.

Why hast thou crucified me afresh on thy hand's cross
Worse than when of old I hung upon the tree?

Methinks this is harder,

Thy sin's cross is heavier for me bound fast unwillingly,

Than was that other rood which once willingly

I for thee ascended." 18

And so Cynewulf's poem ends with the final locking of hell and the opening of heaven to the just, and with this description of the Perfect Land :—

"There is angels' song bliss of the blessed,

There is the dear face of the Lord Eternal

To the blessed brighter than all the sun's beaming.

There is love of the loved ones, life without death's end;

Merry man's multitude, youth without age,

Glory of God's chivalry, health without pain,

Rest for right doers, rest without toil,

Day without darkness, bliss without bale,

Peace between friends, peace without jealousy,

Love that envieth not, in the union of the saints,

For the blessed in Heaven, nor hunger nor thirst,
Nor sleep, nor sickness, nor sun's heat,
Nor cold, nor care, but the happy company.

Fairest of all hosts shall ever enjoy

Their sovran's grace and glory with their King."

Such, then, in briefest analysis is the outline of Cynewulf's poem. What, then, shall we say of it? How especially does it seem to us for in conclusion I must return to the question with which I set outthat the Personality of the Christ is conceived by this singer and poet of our Northern Church in the England of a thousand years ago?

Of the poem as a whole I think we may say this, that although in its structure we cannot deny that the old is still somewhat interwoven with the new, the old

romantic and mythical elements of Celtic or Teutonic origin tending somewhat to paganise the purity of Christian faith, still Cynewulf's song is a trumpet voice of the heart which belongs essentially to our English nature. In grasp, in variety, in narrative skill, Cynewulf, it is true, is hopelessly inferior to Dante or Milton; yet, in vividness, in poignancy, in hope, in love, in tenderness, he belongs to the same order as they, and in his sense of the sublime, as in that picture of the cross towering to the heavens like a mythic Yggdrasil, he needs not shrink from a comparison with even the prophets of the sublime. deed, I think it is not too much to say, in the words of one of his latest commentators, that "the lofty music of Milton's 'mighty mouthed harmonies,' and not less perhaps Milton's sombre Puritan faith and its somewhat lurid conceptions of the future of the unsaved, come down to him in legitimate descent from this earliest exaltation of English Psalm."

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In the theology of his poem Cynewulf is quite evidently an orthodox believer after the standard of the Western Church of his time, in substantial agreement with Pope Gregory, the father of Latin Christianity in England. "Not only does he frequently extol the Trinity, but he specifies the Three Persons, even explicitly identifying the Father with the Son and with the Spirit. The Father is thought of especially as the Creator, though this function is sometimes attributed to the Son, and sometimes exercised by Him in conjunction with the Father. Christ, though God's Son, and con

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ceived by the Holy Ghost, is God of God, without beginning, co-eternal and co-abiding with the Father, and eternally generated by Him. He is called Emmanuel, and designated a priest after the order of Melchizedec. Of His life on earth, we have mention of His birth, His miracles, His trial and crucifixion, the harrowing of hell, the Resurrection and Ascension. He sitteth at the right hand of the Father, throned among the angels, and thence shall come in glory to judge the world."

And it is this last clause of the Christian Creed— this faith in the ascended Christ victorious over sin and death and hell-which gives, I think, the distinctive note to Cynewulf's poem, as indeed it probably does also to Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Personal sorrow for sin, the rapture wrought by the conviction of redemption through Christ's cross, this of course finds lyric expression in Anglo-Saxon poetry. For the personal cry after all is the human basis of poetry as it is of prayer. But the final overthrow of evil, the final victory of good, this also finds triumphant, exultant expression. For an optimistic faith in the highest forces which govern human destiny as beneficent and progressive, is the truest inspiration of poetry as it is of worship. And although it is true that the glory of Christ's conquest is, as I said, conceived by Cynewulf in somewhat Saga fashion, and the story of the harrowing of hell and the victor's return in triumph to His heavenly home is depicted in images largely borrowed from the war legends of our heathen forefathers, yet it is this conception of Christ as a victor crowned and triumphant, with the signs of the Passion accomplished and fulfilled kept in the background, which

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