ICIANS. _Illuminated MS., British
Museum._]

In variety, inventiveness, and lyrical qualities, his poetry shows an
advance over the Caedmonian cycle. He has a poet's love for the beauty
of the sun and the moon (_heofon-condelle_), for the dew and the rain,
for the strife of the waves (_holm-ethroece_), for the steeds of the sea
(_sund-hengestas_), and for the "all-green" (_eal-gr=ene_) earth. "For
Cynewulf," says a critic, "'earth's crammed with heaven and every
common bush afire with God.'"

Cynewulf has inserted his name in runic characters in four poems:
_Christ_, _Elene_, _Juliana_, a story of a Christian martyr, and the
least important, _The Fates of the Apostles_. The _Christ_, a poem on
the Savior's Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the
last day, sometimes suggests Dante's _Inferno_ or _Paradiso_, and
Milton's _Paradise Lost_. We see the--

"Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect,
With the bitter-biting jaws--school of burning creatures."[19]

Cynewulf closes the _Christ_ with almost as beautiful a conception of
Paradise as Dante's or Milton's,--a conception that could never have
occurred to a poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction
of Christianity:--

"...Hunger is not there nor thirst,
Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun;
Neither cold nor care."[20]

_Elene_ is a dramatic poem, named from its heroine, Helena, the mother
of the Roman emperor Constantine. A vision of the cross bearing the
inscription, "With this shalt thou conquer," appeared to Constantine
before a victorious battle and caused him to send his mother to the
Holy Land to discover the true cross. The story of her successful
voyage is given in the poem _Elene_. The miraculous power of the true
cross among counterfeits is shown in a way that suggests kinship with
the fourteenth century miracle plays. A dead man is brought in contact
with the first and the second cross, but the watchers see no divine
manifestation until he touches the third cross, when he is restored to
life.

_Elene_ and the _Dream of the Road_, also probably written by
Cynewulf, are an Anglo-Saxon apotheosis of the cross. Some of this
Cynewulfian poetry is inscribed on the famous Ruthwell cross in
Dumfriesshire.

Andreas and Phoenix.--Cynewulf is probably the author of _Andreas_,
an unsigned poem of special excellence and dramatic power. The poem,
"a romance of the sea," describes St. Andrew's voyag