ee the praise,
Voice of past times, O Venerable Bede!

PREFACE.

Many years ago a friend remarked to me on the strangeness of the
circumstance that the greatest event in the history of a nation, its
conversion to Christianity, largely as it is often recorded in national
legends, has never been selected as a theme for poetry. That event may
indeed not supply the materials necessary for an Epic or a Drama, yet it
can hardly fail to abound in details significant and pathetic, which
especially invite poetic illustration. With the primary interest of that
great crisis, many others, philosophical, social, and political,
generally connect themselves. Antecedent to a nation's conversion, the
events of centuries have commonly either conduced to it, or thrown
obstacles in its way; while the history as well as the character of that
nation in the subsequent ages is certain to have been in a principal
measure modified by that event. Looking back consequently on that period
in which the moral influences of ages, early and late, are imaged, a
people recognises its own features as in a mirror, but sees them such as
they were when their expression was still undetermined; and it may well
be struck by the resemblance at once to what now exists, and also by the
dissimilitude. Many countries have unhappily lost almost all authentic
records connected with their conversion. Such would have been the fate
of England also, had it not been for a single book, 'Bede's
Ecclesiastical History.' In the following poems I have endeavoured to
walk in the footsteps of that great master. Their scope will best be
indicated by some remarks upon the character of that wonderful age which
he records.

St. Augustine landed in the Isle of Thanet A.D. 597, and Bede died A.D.
735. The intervening period, that of his chronicle, is the golden age of
Anglo-Saxon sanctity. Notwithstanding some twenty or thirty years of
pagan reaction, it was a time of rapid though not uninterrupted
progress, and one of an interest the more touching when contrasted with
the calamities which followed so soon. Between the death of Bede and the
first Danish invasion, were eighty years, largely years of decline,
moral and religious. Then followed eighty years of retribution, those of
the earlier Danish wars, till, with the triumph of Alfred, England's
greatest king, came the Christian restoration. Once more periods of
relaxed morals and sacrilegious princes alternated with