More than five hundred years after the landing of these tribes, and while they called themselves Englishmen, we find the Latin writers of the Middle Ages speaking of the inhabitants of Britain as Anglisaxones,—­that is, Saxons of England,—­to distinguish them from the Saxons of the Continent.  In the Latin charters of King Alfred the same name appears; but it is never seen or heard in his native speech.  There he always speaks of his beloved “Englelond” and of his brave “Englisc” people.  In the sixteenth century, when the old name of Englishmen clung to the new people resulting from the union of Saxon and Norman, the name Anglo-Saxon was first used in the national sense by the scholar Camden[21] in his History of Britain; and since then it has been in general use among English writers.  In recent years the name has gained a wider significance, until it is now used to denote a spirit rather than a nation, the brave, vigorous, enlarging spirit that characterizes the English-speaking races everywhere, and that has already put a broad belt of English law and English liberty around the whole world.

THE LIFE.  If the literature of a people springs directly out of its life, then the stern, barbarous life of our Saxon forefathers would seem, at first glance, to promise little of good literature.  Outwardly their life was a constant hardship, a perpetual struggle against savage nature and savage men.  Behind them were gloomy forests inhabited by wild beasts and still wilder men, and peopled in their imagination with dragons and evil shapes.  In front of them, thundering at the very dikes for entrance, was the treacherous North Sea, with its fogs and storms and ice, but with that indefinable call of the deep that all men hear who live long beneath its influence.  Here they lived, a big, blond, powerful race, and hunted and fought and sailed, and drank and feasted when their labor was done.  Almost the first thing we notice about these big, fearless, childish men is that they love the sea; and because they love it they hear and answer its call: 

    ...  No delight has he in the world,
    Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
    A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.[22]

As might be expected, this love of the ocean finds expression in all their poetry.  In Beowulf alone there are fifteen names for the sea, from the holm, that is, the horizon sea, the “upmounding,” to the brim, which is the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach at your feet.  And the figures used to describe or glorify it—­“the swan road, the whale path, the heaving battle plain”—­are almost as numerous.  In all their poetry there is a magnificent sense of lordship over the wild sea even in its hour of tempest and fury: 

    Often it befalls us, on the ocean’s highways,
    In the boats our boatmen, when the storm is roaring,
    Leap the billows over, on our stallions of the foam.[23]