"I count it a circumstance so wonderful as to merit
some preliminary setting forth here, that with regard to
the first seven hundred years of our poetry we English-speaking people
appear never to have confirmed ourselves unto ourselves. While we often
please our vanity with remarking the outcrop of Anglo-Saxon blood
in our modern physical achievements, there is certainly little
in our present art of words to show a literary lineage running back
to the same ancestry. Of course it is always admitted
that there WAS an English poetry as old to Chaucer as Chaucer is to us;
but it is admitted with a certain inclusive and amateur vagueness
removing it out of the rank of facts which involve grave and important duties.
We can neither deny the fact nor the strangeness of it,
that the English poetry written between the time of Aldhelm and Caedmon
in the seventh century and that of Chaucer in the fourteenth century
has never yet taken its place by the hearths and in the hearts of the people
whose strongest prayers are couched in its idioms. It is not found
in the tatters of use, on the floors of our children's playrooms;
there are no illuminated boy's editions of it; it is not
on the booksellers' counters at Christmas; it is not studied
in our common schools; it is not printed by our publishers;
it does not lie even in the dusty corners of our bookcases;
nay, the pious English scholar must actually send to Germany
for Grein's Bibliothek in order to get a compact reproduction
of the body of Old English poetry.
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