Earth Has the Lord-Builders.

Sometimes you just pick up a book and thumb through for the joy of the words, well here is a few caught by Jacquetta Hawkes, the first is from Beowulf

With seabirds sousing in the spray,
And the hail and the snow seep down day by day.
Heavier are wounds then
For the sweet lord in his heart. And when
The sorrow of the thoughts of kin
Run through his mind and searches in,
His heart goes to find them in the hall
The warriors of old strength




And here she introduces the concept of the new Anglo-saxon invaders to the land of the Celts;
"The invasions were almost as incoherent, as empirical as those of prehistoric times, and the invaders had to fit themselves into the land as they found it before they could begin, without plan or intention, to remould it. In so doing, inevitably they were drawn to the open and still cultivated lands that encircled the decaying towns. But just as it made little difference to the Britons whether they were struggling to maintain disorganized lives in the corner of a forum or the corner of a cave, so the Anglo -Saxons accepted the relics of Roman civilisation as a natural if awe-inspiring feature of their new land"

Here she quotes a part of The Ruin, which most people believe is about Bath...

Curious is this stonework! The Fates destroyed it;
The torn buildings falter; moulder the works of giants.
The roofs are tipped down, the turrets turn over,
The barred gate is broken, white lies on mortar
The frost, and open stands the arching, cumber of lumber
Eaten under with age. Earth has the Lord-Builders.

Taken from The Land by Jacquetta Hawkes

The painting is taken from The Royal Academy pictures shown for 1897 and is called "A Corner of old England" by C.E.Johnson R.I.