Naturally, this flight of a nation to its fastnesses was not without clamor and lament; some of which—if we may trust current Cymric traditions—was put into such piercing sound as has come down to our own day in the shape of Welsh war-songs. Dates are uncertain; but without doubt somewhat of this Celtic shrill singing was of earlier utterance than anything of equal literary quality that came from our wrangling Saxon or West-Saxon forefathers in the fertile plains of England.
Some of these Celtic war strains have been turned into a music by the poet Gray[3] which our English ears love; Emerson used to find regalement in the strains of another Welsh bard; and the Mabinogion, a pleasant budget of old Cymric fable,[4] has come to a sort of literary resurrection in our day under the hands of the late Sidney Lanier. If you would know more of things Celtic, I would commend to your attention a few lectures read at Oxford in 1864-65 by Matthew Arnold in which he has brought a curious zeal, and his wonted acumen to an investigation of the influences upon English literature of that old Celtic current. It was a wild, turbulent current; it had fret and roar in it; it had passion and splendor in it; and there are those who think that whatever ardor of imagination, or love for brilliant color or music may belong to our English race is due to old interfusion of British blood. Certainly the lively plaids of the Highlander and his bagpipes show love for much color and exuberant gush of sound; and we all understand that the Celtic Irishman has an appetite for a shindy which demonstrates a rather lively emotional nature.
Beginning of English Learning.
But over that ancient England covered with its alternating fens and forests, and grimy Saxon hamlets, and Celtic companies of huts, there streams presently a new civilizing influence. It is in the shape of Christian monks[5] sent by Pope Gregory the Great, who land upon the island of Thanet near the Thames mouth (whereabout are now the bustling little watering places of Ramsgate and Margate), and march two by two—St. Augustine among them and towering head and shoulders above the rest—bearing silver crosses and singing litanies, up to the halls of Ethelbert—near to the very site where now stands, in those rich Kentish lands, the august and beautiful Cathedral of Canterbury. There, too, sprung up in those earlier centuries that Canterbury School, where letters were taught, and learned men congregated, and whence emerged that famous scholar—Aldhelm,[6] of whom the great King Alfred speaks admiringly; who not only knew his languages but could sing a song; a sort of early Saxon Sankey who beguiled wanderers into better ways by his homely rhythmic utterance. I think we may safely count this old Aldhelm, who had a strain of royal blood in him, as the first of English ballad-mongers.
From the north of England, too, there was at almost the same date, another gleam of crosses, coming by way of Ireland and Iona, where St. Columba,[7] commemorated in one of Wordsworth’s Sonnets, had established a monastery. We have the good old Irish monk’s lament at leaving his home in Ireland for the northern wilderness; there is true Irish fervor in it:—“From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eyes when I turn to Erin—to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the clerks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle, and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.”
Ruined remnants of the Iona monastery are still to be found on that little Western island—within hearing almost of the waves that surge into the caves of Staffa. And from this island stand-point, the monkish missions were established athwart Scotland; finding foothold too all down the coast of Northumberland. Early among these and very notable, was the famous Abbey of Lindisfarne or the Holy Isle, not far southward from the mouth of the Tweed. You will recall the name as bouncing musically, up and down, through Scott’s poem of “Marmion.” A little farther to the south, upon the Yorkshire coast, came to be established, shortly afterward, the Whitby monastery; its ruins make now one of the shows of Whitby town—one of the favorite watering places of the eastern coast of England, and well known for giving its name to what is called Whitby jet—which is only a finer sort of bituminous coal, of which there are great beds in the neighborhood.[8] The Abbey ruin is upon heights, from which are superb views out upon the German Sea that beats with grand uproar upon the Whitby cliffs. To the westward is the charming country of Eskdale, and by going a few miles southward one may come to Robinhood’s bay; and in the intervening village of Hawsker may be seen the two stones said to mark the flight of the arrows of Robinhood and Little John, when they tried their skill for the amusement of the monks of Whitby.
Cædmon.
Well, in the year of our Lord 637, this Whitby Abbey was founded by the excellent St. Hilda, and it was under her auspices, and by virtue of her saintly encouragements, that the first true English poet, Cædmon, began to sing his Christian song of the creation. He was but a cattle-tender—unkempt—untaught, full of savagery, but with a fine phrenzy in him, which made his paraphrase of Scripture a spur, and possibly—in a certain imperfect sense, a model for the muse of John Milton.
Of the chaos before creation, he says:—