Page:The English Peasant.djvu/18

 received him into the monastery with all his, causing him to be taught the Holy History and the Gospel, which he, pondering over, turned into sweetest verse, his song and his verse being so winsome to hear that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth.

Thus King Alfred relates Bede's story of the inspiration of the Father of English Poetry. The Divine Messenger came and awoke the Soul of this English Labourer in a stable; fitting birthplace for the first cry of the humble representative throughout English History, of the Man of Sorrows and the Acquaintance of grief.

Over its cradle bent holy women like St. Hild, saintly men like the venerable Bede, and godly kings like Alfred the Great.

If twelve hundred years ago an English Labourer was capable of writing poems which would appear the prototype of Paradise Lost, what treasures must have lain hid in the souls of the agricultural poor, condemned through all these long ages to ignorance, to heavy labour and grinding poverty: an ignorance, a labour, a poverty ever increasing.

To trace this Via Dolorosa is a sad work; but the poet will come who will find in it the material not only of a Paradise Lost, but of a Paradise Regained, for if he has to tell how this great mute Soul was made an offering for National wrong-doing and has to describe its suffering even unto death, he will have the joy of singing its resurrection, an event accomplished in our own day.

Those crouching figures that we see sometimes supporting the roof of a great building are fit emblems of the vast mass of the European peoples during the Middle Ages. Both in the lands under Roman and under Teutonic law, the great majority were in a state of slavery. Among the Saxons the landless man must belong to somebody, or he had no legal existence; he became an outlaw, and anyone might slay him.