Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature.
Book Description
General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1855 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE. The ...
MoreGeneral Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1855 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE. The Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of " The Exploits of Beowulf " forms a strikmg contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Caedmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity ; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period -- the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that hero-life, which the Homeric poem's first painted for mankind -- that hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental romance of another age and another race. The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their dominion as " sea-kings" on the illimitable ocean. The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons. We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess ; vaunting and talkative ol their sires and of themselves ; the son ever known by denoting the ...
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