LYRIC poetry in English begins, we may almost say, with
the first accents of Anglo-Saxon verse that rise above the
narrative pitch. We trace its congenial element long before
it has arrived at any recognised forms; there are signs of
its oncoming in Widsith, and in Beowulf it seems about
to emerge wherever the epic movement of that poem becomes
quickened, and the narrator grows invocative under stress
of memory and personal emotion--as in one famous North
Sea passage--

Then we together on the sea faring
Five nights forth fared; by floods hurl'd apart;
Welt'ring the waves; weather the coldest,
With darkening night, and northern wind,
Battle-grim billows, rough-crashing breakers,
The mood of the see-beasts turn'd into rage."

There are lines in this rugged epic of the sea-change and
prior wanderings of the immigrant race, if not their settlement
in this island, which are more lyrical than those I have
quoted. But Beowulf is still at a literary remove from
the warriors' and seafarers' tales and folk-songs out of which
it is freely compounded; it is, we soon detect, the work of a
Scôp who is also a writing man; and when at the outset of
the inquiry into the lyric art we attempt to get at the instinctive
origins, such poems do not carry us back far enough. Indeed,
in English, a relatively late tongue, it is hard to get at the
primitive note, in some echo of the first song emerging from

-1-