great bitterness, and we
follow it as it flies from us, and love it although it is passing
away."[128]

Such are also the descriptions of landscapes, where even now, in this
final period of the Anglo-Saxon epoch, northern nature, snow and ice are
visibly described, as in "Beowulf," with delight, by connoisseurs: "As
St. Paul was looking towards the northern region of the earth, from
whence all waters pass down, he saw above the water a hoary stone, and
north of the stone had grown woods, very rimy. And there were dark
mists; and under the stone was the dwelling-place of monsters and
execrable creatures."[129]

* * * * *

Thus Anglo-Saxon literature, in spite of the efforts of Cynewulf,
Alfred, Dunstan, and AElfric goes on repeating itself. Poems, histories,
and sermons are conspicuous, now for their grandeur, now for the emotion
that is in them; but their main qualities and main defects are very much
alike; they give an impression of monotony. The same notes, not very
numerous, are incessantly repeated. The Angles, Saxons, and other
conquerors who came from Germany have remained, from a literary point of
view, nearly intact in the midst of the subjugated race. Their
literature is almost stationary; it does not perceptibly move and
develop. A graft is wanted; Rome tried to insert one, but a few branches
only were vivified, not the whole tree; and the fruit is the same each
year, wild and sometimes poor.

The political state of the country leaves on the mind a similar
impression. The men of Germanic blood established in England remain, or
nearly so, grouped together in tribes; their hamlet is the mother
country for them. They are unable to unite against the foreign foe.
Their subdivisions undergo constant change, much as they did, centuries
before, on the Continent. A swarm of petty kings, ignored by history,
are known to have lived and reigned, owing to their name having been
found appended to charters; there were kings of the Angles of the South,
kings of half Kent, kings with fewer people to rule than a village mayor
of to-day. They are killed, and, as we have seen, the thing is of no
importance.

The Danes come again; at one time they own the whole of England, which
is thus subject to the same king as Scandinavia. Periods of unification
are merely temporary, and due to the power or the genius of a prince:
Alfred, AEthelstan, Cnut the Dane; but the people of Great Britain keep
the