“The soul hath need of prophet and redeemer. 
    Her outstretched wings against her prisoning bars
  She waits for truth, and truth is with the dreamer
    Persistent as the myriad light of stars."[5]

We need to listen to a poet like Browning, who—­

  “Never doubted clouds would break,
    Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph. 
  Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
        Sleep to wake.”

In the fourth place, the twentieth century is emphasizing the fact that neither happiness nor perpetuity of government is possible without the development of a spirit of service,—­a truth long since taught by English literature.  We may learn this lesson from Beowulf, the first English epic, from Alfred the Great, from William Langland, and from Chaucer’s Parish Priest.  All Shakespeare’s greatest and happiest characters, all the great failures of his dramas, are sermons on this text.  In The Tempest he presents Ariel, tendering his service to Prospero:—­

  “All hail, great master! grave sir, hail!  I come
  To answer thy best pleasure.”

Shakespeare delights to show Ferdinand winning Miranda through service, and Caliban remaining an abhorred creature because he detested service.  Much of modern literature is an illuminated text on the glory of service.  Coleridge voiced for all the coming years what has grown to be almost an elemental feeling to the English-speaking race:—­

  “He prayeth best who loveth best
  All things both great and small.”

The Home and Migrations of the Anglo-Saxon Race.—­Just as there was a time when no English foot had touched the shores of America, so there was a period when the ancestors of the English lived far away from the British Isles.  For nearly four hundred years prior to the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, Britain had been a Roman province.  In 410 A.D. the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain to protect Rome herself against swarms of Teutonic invaders.  About 449 a band of Teutons, called Jutes, left Denmark, landed on the Isle of Thanet (in the north-eastern part of Kent), and began the conquest of Britain.  Warriors from the tribes of the Angles and the Saxons soon followed, and drove westward the original inhabitants, the Britons or Welsh, i.e. foreigners, as the Teutons styled the natives.

Before the invasion of Britain, the Teutons inhabited the central part of Europe as far south as the Rhine, a tract which in a large measure coincides with modern Germany.  The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons were different tribes of Teutons.  These ancestors of the English dwelt in Denmark and in the lands extending southward along the North Sea.

The Angles, an important Teutonic tribe, furnished the name for the new home, which was called Angle-land, afterward shortened into England.  The language spoken by these tribes is generally called Anglo-Saxon or Saxon.