d denied by Fritzsche.
"Dream of the Rood" follows similar fluctuations. The truth is that
while there were doubtless movement and development in Anglo-Saxon
poetry, as in all human things, they were very slow and difficult to
measure. When material facts and landmarks are discovered, still it will
remain true that till then authorities, judging poems on their own
merits, could not agree as to their classification, so little apparent
was the movement they represent. Anglo-Saxon poetry is like the river
Saone; one doubts which way it flows.

Let us therefore take this literature as a whole, and confess that the
division here adopted, of national and worldly and of religious
literature, is arbitrary, and is merely used for the sake of
convenience. Religious and worldly, northern and southern literature
overlap; but they most decidedly belong to the same Anglo-Saxon whole.

This whole has strong characteristics of its own, a force, a passion, a
grandeur, unexampled at that day. Contrary to what is found in Celtic
literature, there is no place in the monuments of Anglo-Saxon thought
for either light gaiety, or those shades of feeling which the Celts
could already express at that remote period. The new settlers are
strong, but not agile. Of the two master passions attributed by Cato to
the inhabitants of Gaul, one alone, the love of war, _rem militarem_, is
shared by the dwellers on the shores of the northern ocean; the other,
_argute loqui_, is unknown to them.

Members of the same family of nations established by the shores of the
North Sea, as the classic nations were on the Mediterranean coasts in
the time of the emperors, the Anglo-Saxon, the German, and the
Scandinavian tribes spoke dialects of the same tongue, preserved common
traditions and the memory of an identical origin. Grein has collected in
his "Anglo-Saxon Library" all that remains of the ancient literature of
England; Powell and Vigfusson have comprised in their "Corpus Poeticum
Boreale" all we possess in the way of poems in the Scandinavian tongue,
formerly composed in Denmark, Norway, the Orkneys, Iceland, and even
Greenland, within the Arctic circle.[43] The resemblances between the
two collections are striking, the differences are few. In both series
it seems as if the same people were revealing its origins, and leading
its heroes to Walhalla.[44] The Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf and the
Scandinavian saga of Gretti, the Anglo-Saxon story of Waldhere and