The first golden door we open in the Great Palace shows us a hero, and that is as it should be, for the English have always been brave. Yet probably the poem about this first English hero is not the first poem. The first is a poem by the name of the "Far Traveller." "Many men and rulers have I known," says this traveler; "through many strange lands I have fared throughout the spacious earth." This poem may not be of great value, but it is a wonderful experience to open this door and see back, back, back, thousands of years to the very cradle in which English literature was born. This first Englishman was a wanderer, as all Englishmen, despite their love of home, have been, or else they would not hold so many great dominions as they do to-day. Then, too, there was "Deor's Lament," with its sad refrain,
Thas ofer eode, thisses swa maeg (That was overcome, so may this be)
and its grave thought that "The All-wise Lord of the world worketh many changes." One more poem, or, better, fragment, is spoken of in Beowulf. "The Fight at Finnesburg" is full of the savagery and fierceness of warfare; it is even more wild and barbarous than "Beowulf."
Now let us open the door over which is written Beowulf. It is one of the oldest and rudest of the golden doors in the Great Palace of English Poetry, but also one of the most precious. The pictures we are to see are beautiful sometimes. More often they are cruel and pitiless.
The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the air was as sweet-smelling as if it rose from fields of lilies, and it was the very springtime of the world some two thousand years ago.
By song little Widsith has seen his master bind all men and all beasts. Not only the fish and worms forgot their tasks, but even the cattle stopped grazing, and, where they passed, men and children paused to listen. They were on their way to the Great Hall to have a sight of the hero, Beowulf.
Behind them lay the sea and the coast-guard pacing up and down. Before them, landward, rose a long, high-roofed hall. It had gable ends from which towered up huge stag-horns. And the roof shone only less brightly than the sun, for it was covered with metal.
About the Great Hall toward which little Widsith and the master were traveling was the village made up of tiny houses, each in its own patch of tilled ground and apple-trees, and with fields in which sheep and oxen and horses were pastured. Narrow paths wound in and out everywhere. In front of the Hall was a broad meadow across which the king and queen and their lords and ladies were used to walk.