the sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a
pathetic poetry. "Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness
or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the fire ring thee, or
the flood whelm thee, or the sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age
o'ertake thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in darkness." Strong
as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that encompassed him,
that girded his life with a thousand perils and broke it at so short a
span. "To us," cries Beowulf in his last fight, "to us it shall be as our
Weird betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!" But the sadness with
which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries of life and death had
nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids men eat and drink for
to-morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of his fate. The
thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the thought of doom.
"Well shall a man do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome
renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death is better than life of shame!"
cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife with
the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life is short, the more cause to
work bravely till it is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end of his
life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!"

[Sidenote: English Piracy]

The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them
to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of
Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at
heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with
tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds
parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance
were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of
fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness