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, 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 and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by personal courage and loyalty to plighted word,