rth hadst found
thy nurture going in the field, a brute without understanding; or in the
desert of wild beasts the worst, yea, though thou hadst been of serpents
the fiercest, then as God willed it, than thou ever on earth shouldst
become a man, or ever baptism should receive"[93]

This soul should fly from me,
And I be changed into some brutish beast
All beasts are happy, for when they die
Their souls are soon ditched in elements
O soul! be changed into small water drops,
And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found

So will, unknown to him, the very same thoughts be expressed by an
English poet of a later day.[94]

Dialogues are not rare in these poems, but they generally differ very
much from the familiar dialogue of the Celts. They are mostly epic in
character, lyric in tone, with abrupt apostrophes causing the listener
to start, like the sudden sound of a trumpet. When the idea is more
fully developed the dialogue becomes a succession of discourses, full of
eloquence and power sometimes, but still discourses. We are equally far
in both cases from the conversational style so frequent in the Irish
stories.[95]

The devotional poetry of the Anglo-Saxons includes translations of the
Psalms,[96] lives of saints, maxims, moral poems, and symbolic ones,
where the supposed habits of animals are used to illustrate the duties
of Christians. One of this latter sort has for its subject the whale
"full of guile," another the panther[97]; a third (incomplete) the
partridge; a fourth, by a different hand, and evincing a very different
sort of poetical taste, the phenix. This poem is the only one in the
whole range of Anglo-Saxon literature in which the warmth and hues of
the south are preserved and sympathetically described. It is a great
change to find a piece of some length with scarcely any frost in it, no
stormy waves and north wind. The poet is himself struck by the
difference, and notices that it is not at all there "as here with us,"
for there "nor hail nor rime on the land descend, nor windy cloud." In
the land of the phenix there is neither rain, nor cold, nor too great
heat, nor steep mountains, nor wild dales; there are no cares, and no
sorrows. But there the plains are evergreen, the trees always bear
fruit, the plants are covered with flowers. It is the home of the
peerless bird. His eyes turn to the sun when it rises in the east, and
at night he "looks earnestly when shall come u