the daily life led by our pagan forefathers.

But though these poems are the oldest in tone, they are not the oldest
in form of all that we possess. It is probable that the most primitive
Anglo-Saxon verse was identical with prose, and consisted merely of
sentences bound together by parallelism. As alliteration, at first a
mere _memoria technica_, became an ornamental adjunct, and grew more
developed, the parallelism gradually dropped out. Gnomes or short
proverbs of this character were in common use, and they closely
resembled the mediæval proverbs current in England to the present day.

With the introduction of Christianity, English verse took a new
direction. It was chiefly occupied in devotional and sacred poetry, or
rather, such poems only have come down to us, as the monks transcribed
them alone, leaving the half-heathen war-songs of the minstrels attached
to the great houses to die out unwritten. The first piece of English
literature which we can actually date is a fragment of the great
religious epic of Cædmon, written about the year 670. Cædmon was a poor
brother in Hild's monastery at Whitby, and he acquired the art of poetry
by a miracle. Northumbria, in the sixth and seventh centuries, took the
lead in Teutonic Britain; and all the early literature is Northumbrian,
as all the later literature is West Saxon. Cædmon's poem consisted in a
paraphrase of the Bible history, from the Creation to the Ascension. The
idea of a translation of the Bible from Latin into English would never
have occurred to any one at that early time. English had as yet no
literary form into which it could be thrown. But Cædmon conceived the
notion of paraphrasing the Bible story in the old alliterative Teutonic
verse, which was familiar to his hearers in songs like _Beowulf_. Some
of the brethren translated or interpreted for him portions of the
Vulgate, and he threw them into rude metre. Only a single short excerpt