Terni nos fratres incertâ matre crearunt;
Qui cupit instanter sitiens audire, docemus,
Turn cito prompta damus rogitanti verba silenter.

We are seventeen sisters voiceless born; six others,
half-sisters, we exclude from our set; children of iron by
iron we die, but children too of the bird's wing that flies so
high; three brethren our sires, be our mother as may; if any
one is very eager to hear, we tell him, and quickly give
answer without any sound.[61]

Aldhelm is the first of the Anglo-Latin poets, and he was a classical
scholar at a time when to be so was a great distinction. Both in prose
and verse, his style has the faults which belong to an age of revived
study. His love of learning, his keen appreciation of its beauty and its
value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of
display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here,
too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes
stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and
disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he
holds. He is the leader of that noble series of English scholars who
represent the first endeavouring stage of recovery after the great
eclipse of European culture.

There is nothing of his remaining in the vernacular; but that he was an
English poet we have testimony which, though late, is not to be
disregarded. William of Malmesbury quotes a book of King Alfred's, which
said that Aldhelm had been a peerless writer of English poetry: and he
adds, moreover, that a popular song, which had been mentioned by Alfred
as Aldhelm's, was still commonly sung in his own time--that is, in the