"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."[6]
The scop in the song called The Wanderer (Exeter Book) tells how fleeting are riches, friend, kinsman, maiden,—all the "earth-stead," and he also makes us think of Shakespeare's "insubstantial pageant faded" which leaves "not a rack behind."
Another old song, also found in the Exeter Book, is the Seafarer. We must imagine the scop recalling vivid experiences to our early ancestors with this song of the sea:—
"Hail flew in hard showers.
And nothing I heard
But the wrath of the waters,
The icy-cold way
At times the swan's song;
In the scream of the gannet
I sought for my joy,
In the moan of the sea whelp
For laughter of men,
In the song of the sea-mew
For drinking of mead."[7]
To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the characteristics of English poetry, we may quote by way of comparison a song sung more than a thousand years later, in Victoria's reign:—
"The wind is as iron that rings,
The foam heads loosen and flee;
It swells and welters and swings,
The pulse of the tide of the sea.
Let the wind shake our flag like a feather,
Like the plumes of the foam of the sea!
* * * * *
In the teeth of the hard glad a weather,
In the blown wet face of the sea."[8]
Kipling in A Song of the English says of the sea:—
"…there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead."
Another song from the Exeter Book is called The Fortunes of Men.
It gives vivid pictures of certain phases of life among the
Anglo-Saxons:—