"And so, as I said, there is to me an indescribable pathos in these sombre pictures of Nature in our old Beowulf here, -- these drear marshes, these monster-haunted meres, that boil with blood and foam with tempests, these fast-rooted, joyless woods that overlean the waters, these enormous, nameless beasts that lie along on promontories all day and wreak vengeance on ships at night -- have you not seen them, headlands running out into the sea like great beasts with their forepaws extended? And is it not a huge Gothic picture of the wind rushing down the windy nesse . . . in the evening, and whelming the frail ships of the old Dane, the old Jute and Frisian and Saxon, in the sea? All these, I say, are mere outcroppings of the rude war which was not yet ended against Nature, traces of a time when Nature was still a savage Mother of Grendel, tearing and devouring the sons of men."*

--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 55.
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Lanier believed strongly that the early English poems ought to be taught in schools and colleges. The following passage does not sound as revolutionary now as it did in 1879: --

"Surely it is time our popular culture were cited into the presence of the Fathers. That we have forgotten their works is in itself matter of mere impiety which many practical persons would consider themselves entitled to dismiss as a purely sentimental crime; but ignorance of their ways goes to the very root of growth.

"I count it a circumstance so wonderful as to merit some preliminary setting forth here, that with regard to the first seven hundred years of our poetry we English-speaking people appear never to have confirmed ourselves unto ourselves. While we often please our vanity with remarking the outcrop of Anglo-Saxon blood in our modern physical achievements, there is certainly little in our present art of words to show a literary lineage running back to the same ancestry. Of course it is always admitted that there WAS an English poetry as old to Chaucer as Chaucer is to us; but it is admitted with a certain inclusive and amateur vagueness removing it out of the rank of facts which involve grave and important duties. We can neither deny the fact nor the strangeness of it, that the English poetry written between the time of Aldhelm and Caedmon in the seventh century and that of Chaucer in the fourteenth century has never yet taken its place by the hearths and in the hearts of the people whose strongest prayers are couched in its idioms. It is not found in the tatters of use, on the floors of our children's playrooms; there are no illuminated boy's editions of it; it is not on the booksellers' counters at Christmas; it is not studied in our common schools; it is not printed by our publishers; it does not lie even in the dusty corners of our bookcases; nay, the pious English scholar must actually send to Germany for Grein's Bibliothek in order to get a compact reproduction of the body of Old English poetry.

     . . . . .

"One will go into few moderately appointed houses in this country without finding a Homer in some form or other; but it is probably far within the truth to say that there are not fifty copies of Beowulf in the United States. Or again, every boy, though far less learned than that erudite young person of Macaulay's, can give some account of the death of Hector; but how many boys -- or, not to mince matters, how many men -- in America could do more than stare if asked to relate the death of Byrhtnoth? Yet Byrhtnoth was a hero of our own England in the tenth century, whose manful fall is recorded in English words that ring on the soul like arrows on armor. Why do we not draw in this poem -- and its like -- with our mother's milk? Why have we no nursery songs of Beowulf and the Grendel? Why does not the serious education of every English-speaking boy commence, as a matter of course, with the Anglo-Saxon grammar?"*

--
* `Music and Poetry', p. 136. This quotation is an expansion of one in the lectures now under consideration. He evidently overstates his point, but the passage suggests what the study of old English meant to Lanier himself.
--

There would come from such study a strengthening of English prose and a deepening of culture. He continues: --

"For the absence of this primal Anglicism from our modern system goes -- as was said -- to the very root of culture. The eternal and immeasurable significance of that individuality in thought which flows into idiom in speech becomes notably less recognized among us. We do not bring with us out of our childhood the fibre of idiomatic English which our fathers bequeathed to us. A boy's English is diluted before it has become strong enough for him to make up his mind clearly as to the true taste of it. Our literature needs Anglo-Saxon iron, -- there is no ruddiness in its cheeks, and everywhere a clear lack of the red corpuscles."

Lanier was more thoroughly at home in the Elizabethan age, however. He reveled in its myriad-mindedness -- its adventures and exploits, its chivalry and romance. The sonnets especially appealed to him, for they abounded in conceits. One of the striking characteristics that he noted in the leading men of that age was the union of strength and tenderness. "All this love-making was manly," he says. "It was then as it is now, that the bravest are the tenderest. . . . Stout and fine Walter Raleigh pushes over to America, quite as ready to sigh a sonnet as to plant a colony. Valorous Philip Sidney, who can write as dainty a sonnet as any lover of them all, can at the same time dazzle the stern eyes of warriors with deeds of manhood before Zuetphen and touch their hearts to pity and admiration as he offers the cup of water -- himself being grievously wounded and in a rage of thirst -- to the dying soldier whose necessity is greater than his. Men's minds in this time were employed with big questions; the old theory of the universe is just losing its long hold upon the intellect, and people are busy with all space, trying to apprehend the relation of their globe to the solar system. To all this ferment the desperate conflict of the Catholic religion with the new form of faith now coming in adds an element of stern strength; men are pondering not only the physical relation of the earth to the heavens, but the spiritual relation of the soul to heaven and hell. This is no dandy period."*

--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 168.
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