Old English

“ The place belongs so entirely to the past, and there seems such a remoteness between the hoar antiquity of a scene so thoroughly old English and the busy world from which we have just emerged, that we almost hesitate to advance. ”

“ And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle English love-longing is certainly one of them. ”

“ Especially in the rapid survey of English literature given in most of our colleges, a collection of translations covering the Anglo-Saxon period and reflecting the form and spirit of the original poems should add much to a fuller appreciation of the varied and rich, though uneven, literary output of our earliest singers.
In subject-matter these Old English poems are full of the keenest interest to students of history, of customs, of legend, of folk-lore, and of art. They form a truly national literature ”

“ The great bulk of Old English prose consists of translation; and in its various shapes English prose adopts the methods of its originals. We have many homilies, some history, and a few pastoral letters, all based strictly upon Latin works. There are very few passages of real originality, and they are short and disjointed. Of historical writing we have the rudiments in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. On the whole, the development is very small, for the prose is bound by the curse of imitativeness. ”

“ A second quality, which is general enough to be constantly attracting attention, is the thoroughly English character of his life. The stock from which he sprang was rich in old English qualities of vigor, sense, and originality ”

“ The language in which the stories are narrated is rich in the quaint and vigorous phrases of Old English, reminding one of the times of Shakespeare and before. One could hardly give the children a better introduction to the riches of our mother tongue. ”

“ He wished to see the youth trained up in the manners and habitudes of the peasantry of the good old times, and thus to lay the foundation for the accomplishment of his favourite object, the revival of old English customs and character. ”

“ Yet he was not wholly insensible to the substantial qualities of the writer, for he discovered in the diction that “the order of words is uniformly more natural, the inflections are more unfrequent, and the phrases of our English begin to emerge.” And, finally, our latest authority decides that this work, so long misinterpreted, is “the oldest, the purest, and by far the most valuable specimen of our old English dialect that time has left us.”5
What is “old English” is the question. ”

“ The New English permit not their brethren of Old England to enjoy their consciences, lest their own numbers might exceed their own, or at least the greatness of their own assemblies and maintenances decrease. ”

“ It borrowed roots and dropped endings, and appropriated syntactical combinations without the inflections which made them logical. [21] There is no proof that Old English was ever spoken anywhere but on the soil of Great Britain. ”

“ How our English vernacular has changed ever since the days of the famous virgin queen, not to mention the more radical changes of the far-remote days of the ill-starred Richard II! A spoken language is constantly changing. It grows and develops, or languishes and decays, upon the lips of those who employ it as their mother-tongue, now incorporating into itself new expressions and idioms and now casting off such as are old and worn out. ”

“ And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their [48] own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? ”

“ They took their poetry seriously, as they did everything about them, and often in spite of crudity of expression, of narrow vision, and of conventionalized modes of speech, this very “high seriousness” raises an otherwise mediocre poem to the level of real literature. Whatever may [6] be said of the limitations of Old English poetry, of its lack of humor, of the narrow range of its sentiments, of the imitativeness of many of its most representative specimens, it cannot be denied the name of real literature ”

“ English a Living Language
Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet, ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. ”

“ And does old Time in all his outworn tales tell any truer, than that the many, being disunited, and so false, have ever been vanquished by the loving, bold, and heroic few? That a child may scan with its fingers our bare arithmetic, will therefore be to us the source of success, as assuredly it will be of glory. The English were few when they mowed down thickly-planted French at Cressy and Poictiers. ”

“ We have modified the common language far less than we have modified the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for refreshing old words by novel combinations. ”

“ The essays typically outline and define the approach, provide examples of the approach (with attention to noteworthy applications) , and suggest topics for further research. Indexed by persons, titles, and some subjects. An exemplary collection by a virtual who’s who of Old English studies, Reading Old English Texts is a model of the kind of work needed for every period of English and American literature. ”

“ There is abundant evidence that the Anglo-Saxon and Norman ancestors from whom sprang the English-speaking peoples were in this respect richly endowed, and that they early went far in the development of this power. The old ballads of our language are so rich and so enduringly beautiful that we are proved to come from a stock endowed with a rich susceptibility to poetry. ”

“ Though closely allied and connected in a specific, and very nearly allied to each other in a general sense, there is that which distinguishes the English of the old world from those of the new, and which can be easily recognized. ”

“ Dual Character of our LanguageIt is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak, and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. ”

“ And therefore the Purity of our Language consisteth in preserving this Character, in writing with the English Strength and Spirit: Let us not envy others, that they are more soft, diffused, and rarified; be it our Commendation to write as we pay in true Sterling; if we want Supplies, we had better revive old Words, than create new Ones. ”

“ Although the English are remarkable for the number and variety of their ancient ballads, and retain perhaps a greater fondness for these old simple rhapsodies of their ancestors, than most other nations; they are not the only people who have distinguished themselves by compositions of this kind. ”

“ And we know what was the opinion current amongst our neighbors the French—people of taste, acuteness, and quick literary tact—not a hundred years ago, about our great poets. The old Biographie Universelle [350] notices the pretension of the English to a place for their poets among the chief poets of the world, and says that this is a pretension which to no one but an Englishman can ever seem admissible. ”

“ In looking at the past through our own vocabulary, we catch glimpses of an early civilization that is of peculiar interest to the English-speaking peoples. By means of words still preserved to us, however altered in signification,—many of them coarse and brutal—we can recall remote perceptions; we are able to review acts of antiquity; and we can reawaken conceptions that were held by those who used our ancestral tongue to express their culture during its earliest known stage. ”

“ And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'
Strange to me now are the forms I meet
When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet,
And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
'A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' ”

“ With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales.
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from they own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd they powers,
And they clear aims be cross and shifting made:
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours. ”

“ In my opinion, it is one praise of many, that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted most bare and barren of both. ”

“ LOSS AND GAIN.—But, while the English language has, in the course of centuries, lost almost all its inflections, it has been all that time gaining new words, and at the same time gaining new powers of expression. In fact, the history of our language is a history of both loss and gain. ”

“ And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and Ælfric was left for generations without literary employment, during which time it lost nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic vocabulary, retaining only the words of common life and everyday use [4] . And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English lexicography stood still. ”

“ He was the first to break loose from the prevailing custom, which confined all learning and philosophy and history, to the constrained medium of a dead language, and commenced those efforts in the living English, which have resulted in giving us a vernacular prose literature, unequalled by that of any other language in the world. ”

“ English is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern phrase. ”

“ All that can be said with definiteness is that she brings the speech and the atmosphere, as it were, of an age or ages long past; that she is thoroughly English, and that while she can and does project herself back into the mists of time, and speak of early medieval scenes as familiarly as of the English renaissance, she does not make use of any knowledge she may possess of modern developments or modern conditions. ”

“ In that greatest period of the race we do not know which is the greater, the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity, the ability to govern, that the English then displayed, or the mighty sweep and range of the imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry. The works of the Elizabethan writers are with us, like the memory of the deeds of the Elizabethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was needful, that the peoples that speak English are of a truth poetic, that they are not prosaic. ”

“ Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? ”

“ The ancient penmanship and curious contents of the faded pages before me carried my thoughts backward into the old Colonial times, with their rigid social distinctions, lofty manners, and ill-concealed superstition ; and I mused upon grim old magistrates, wizened witches, stately dames, rugged Indian-fighters, and all their strange doings and sayings in the ancient days, until, between drowsiness and imagining. I fell into a tangled labyrinth of romance, history, and reverie. ”

“ We pass now from a survey of its poetry, both non-dramatic and dramatic, to the work done in the fifteenth century for the development of English prose. Until quite towards the close of the fourteenth century England can hardly be said to have possessed any prose literature not avowedly or practically of a didactic character. To save some one's soul or to improve some one's morals were seemingly the only motives which could suffice to persuade an Englishman to write his native language except in verse. ”