mark of the poet's work.

Wonderful things have been given to us "under the similitude of a
dream"; things beautiful and terrible, things wise and strange. There
have been Dreamers of Dreams into whose souls have sunk the sight and
the hearing of deep things, high things and precious, of comfort and of
warning, of sweetest help and of gravest and most earnest exhortation.

The speech of these Dreamers has sounded in our ears, and has left the
vibrations to go on and on for our lifetime: this we call remembering.

In English literature we have some great tellings "under the similitude
of a dream." We have the nineteenth-century "Dream of Gerontius," our
great Cardinal's drama of the soul in its parting and after. We have the
seventeenth-century dream from the darkness of Bedford Gaol, whence John
Bunyan saw the pilgrims on their way, through dangers and trials, on to
the river that must be crossed before they could come to the Celestial
City. We have the fourteenth-century dream of the gaunt, sad-souled
William Langley, the dreamer of the Malvern Hills. And, earlier by many
a century, we have the dream of the dreamer at the depth of midnight,
the midnight whose heart was bright with the splendour of the glorious
vesting and gem-adorning of the Cross of Jesus Christ, and dark with the
moisture of the Sacred Blood that oozed therefrom.

We have first the simple, quiet prelude.

Lo, I will tell of the best of dreams, I dreamed at the deep midnight,
When all men lay at rest.

Then comes the description of the Cross in its glory. It is uplift and
girt with light, flooded with gold and set with precious gems. This is
followed by the seeing through the glory, the seeing of the anguish. The
hues are shifted from dark to bright; the light of gold lights it, and
yet anon it is wet, defiled with Blood. Here are the two sides of the
Passion: the veiled glory, and the illumined anguish: the supreme might,
and the absolute weakness: the darkness of the grave, and the light of
the Resurrection.

While time shall be, the Cross is to us all the Book where we may read
all we choose to read, all God sends us grace to read. Cynewulf chose to
read, and with Cynewulf was the grace of God.

The poet lies beholding the wondrous sight: the sight that all God's
fair angels beheld, and all the universe, and men of mortal breath.

The Rood speaks to Cynewulf. To us, with every look upon the Cross,
should come, would come, were we a