ever so many trees, and it be found out afterwards, let him
pay for three trees, each with thirty shillings. He is not
required to pay for more of them, however many they may be,
_because the axe is a reporter, and not a thief_." [The
italicized sentences are evidently current sayings.]

But even these remains, important and interesting as they are, may not
be called the beginning of a vernacular literature. It is among the
Angles of Northumbria that we shall find the earliest native and truly
literary awakening in England. Here we perceive the endeavor to do
something more than merely to aid the memory of men in preserving
necessary laws and records of important events. The imagination had
become active. The impulse was felt to give expression to deep emotions,
to sing the deeds and noble character of some hero embodying the
loftiest ideals of the time and the race, to utter deep religious
feeling. There was an effort to do this in a form showing harmony in
theme and presentation. Here we find displayed a feeling for art, often
crude, but still a true and native impulse. This activity produced or
gave definite form to the earliest Anglo-Saxon poetry, a poetry often of
a very high quality; perhaps never of the highest, but always of intense
interest. We may claim even a greater distinction for the early fruit of
Anglo-Saxon inspiration. Mr. Stopford Brooke says:--"With the exception
of perhaps a few Welsh and Irish poems, it is the only vernacular poetry
in Europe, outside of the classic tongues, which belongs to so early a
time as the seventh and eighth centuries."

The oldest of these poems belong in all save their final form to the
ancient days in Northern Germany. They bear evidence of transmission,
with varying details, from gleeman to gleeman, till they were finally
carried over to England and there edited, often with discordant
interpolations and modifications, by Christian scribes. Tacitus tells us
that at his time songs or poems were a marked feature in the life of the
Germans; but we cannot trace the clue further. To these more ancient
poems many others were added by Christian Northumbrian poets, and we
find that a large body of poetry had grown up in the North before the
movement was entirely arrested by the destroying Northmen. Not one of
these poems, unless we except a few fragmentary verses, has come down to
us in the Northumbrian dialect. Fortunately they had been transcribed by
the