Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CAEDMON. The old British songs and the story of Beowulf belong to the time before England received the name it is now known by, and when the tribes which inhabited the land were often hostile, and always jealous of the power which each held. But as years passed the land grew more peaceful, and even the old warriors who had fought so fiercely at length came to imagine a future when there should be harmony between the different tribes, and when their children’s children should no longer look upon one another as rivals, but all should be joined together by mutual interests, and the word English stand for all the people who called that country their home. And this time at last actually came, but in a way perhaps that the fierce sea-kings hadnever dreamed of, for the cause was so unlike anything that had ever influenced them, that it is no wonder they could know nothing of it. Differ as they might in many things, the Saxons and the Britons were all alike in their love for battle and the deep, undying hatred which they felt toward an invader of their homes. The British chieftain longed to die finally in battle, for his religion taught him it was the one glorious thing to do, and the Saxon chief was filled with the same desire, for the priests had taught him that only in this way could he win entrance to Valhalla, the Norseman’s heaven. But there had come to Britain from across the sea, many years before the first Saxons landed on its shores, a little band of men who neither were dressed in glittering armor, nor held in their hands the cruel weapons of war, but who wore coarse garments such as the poorest might have worn, and bore a banner on which was wrought the figure of a dove, the emblem of peace. They were Christian missionaries who hadheard of the cruel…
