. . . . .
"One will go into few moderately appointed houses in this country
without finding a Homer in some form or other; but it is probably
far within the truth to say that there are not fifty copies of Beowulf
in the United States. Or again, every boy, though far less learned
than that erudite young person of Macaulay's, can give some account
of the death of Hector; but how many boys -- or, not to mince matters,
how many men -- in America could do more than stare if asked to relate
the death of Byrhtnoth? Yet Byrhtnoth was a hero of our own England
in the tenth century, whose manful fall is recorded in English words
that ring on the soul like arrows on armor. Why do we not draw in this poem
-- and its like -- with our mother's milk? Why have we no nursery songs
of Beowulf and the Grendel? Why does not the serious education
of every English-speaking boy commence, as a matter of course,
with the Anglo-Saxon grammar?"*
--
* `Music and Poetry', p. 136. This quotation is an expansion of one
in the lectures now under consideration. He evidently overstates his point,
but the passage suggests what the study of old English meant
to Lanier himself.
--
There would come from such study a strengthening of English prose
and a deepening of culture. He continues: --
"For the absence of this primal Anglicism from our modern system
goes -- as was said -- to the very root of culture.
The eternal and immeasurable significance of that individuality in thought
which flows into idiom in speech becomes notably less recognized among us.
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