nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and
sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of
Berkshire; Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of
Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the
purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at
no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his
own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and
English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father
offered to the gods of his hearth.

[Sidenote: The English Temper]

It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of
flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have
it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
missionary of the days of Bæda and Boniface who gathered in the very
homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil
of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the
hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with
them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these fifty winters," sings the
hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. "Lives
there no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of them--dare in the
war-strife welcome my onset! Time's change and chances I have abided,
held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never sware I falsely
against right. So for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I
sit here, wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such a temper, strong
with the strength of manhood and full of the vigour and the love of life,