Page:Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (tr. Jane).djvu/21

Rh Into that fatalistic brooding of the North, which could only say at best and bravest that Wyrd sometimes saved an undoomed man when his courage was good, has come a vision of an eternity of joy. The soul might still be seen, as in Coifi's famous apologue, in guise of a sparrow flying swiftly through the fire-lit Hall of Life: only outside that Hall no wintry storms of rain or snow now awaited it, but a homing flight under starry heavens to the Heart of Love. We are present in Bede's story at many death-beds. This is not only because mortality was more in evidence then than now, but also, and chiefly, because at this point, so dark, so sad to the heathen world, the marvel of the new faith was clearest. These lights that hover softly over the homes of prayer, these angel songs heard especially at the shrouded moment of the soul's passing, these sights of ascending spirits clothed in glory, betoken a conception of death and being that had been strange indeed to the old Germanic world. One notes the intimate relation of these phenomena to the new tenderness. They spring from no ascetic egotism, but from intensity of love; for they habitually concern, not the person to whom they are vouchsafed, but some one dear to him. Even while Bede wrote, or a little earlier, rainbow mosaics in the apse of churches at Ravenna and elsewhere were enshrining for all time symbols of the Christian hope. Those solemn fields of Paradise, where fair emblems of eternal life drawn from the world of beast and blossom surround the triumphant Cross, rise to memory as one reads of the mystic visions of the night revealed so often to devout men and women in the Northern Isles.

The widening of the Universe brought awe as well as joy. The Cædmonian poems and those of Cynewulf show the majestic sequences of a drama which sweeps beyond the range of mortal sight—beginning with Creation, enduring till Judgment; abysses of spiritual being into which the men of the eighth century gazed overwhelmed. Bede's book is a rich repository of those imaginative concepts of the Other-World which were to dominate the middle ages. These concepts are here