In the song of the sea-mew
For drinking of mead."[7]

To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the characteristics of
English poetry, we may quote by way of comparison a song sung more
than a thousand years later, in Victoria's reign:--

"The wind is as iron that rings,
The foam heads loosen and flee;
It swells and welters and swings,
The pulse of the tide of the sea.

Let the wind shake our flag like a feather,
Like the plumes of the foam of the sea!
* * * * *
In the teeth of the hard glad a weather,
In the blown wet face of the sea."[8]

Kipling in _A Song of the English_ says of the sea:--

"...there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead."

Another song from the _Exeter Book_ is called _The Fortunes of Men_.
It gives vivid pictures of certain phases of life among the
Anglo-Saxons:--

"One shall sharp hunger slay;
One shall the storms beat down;
One be destroyed by darts,