The religious poets of the Anglo-Saxons open the graves; the idea of death haunts them as much as it did their pagan ancestors; they look intently at the "black creatures, grasping and greedy," and follow the process of decay to the end. They address the impious dead: "It would have been better for thee very much, ... that thou hadst been created a bird, or a fish in the sea, or like an ox upon the earth hadst found thy nurture going in the field, a brute without understanding; or in the desert of wild beasts the worst, yea, though thou hadst been of serpents the fiercest, then as God willed it, than thou ever on earth shouldst become a man, or ever baptism should receive"[93] This soul should fly from me, And I be changed into some brutish beast All beasts are happy, for when they die Their souls are soon ditched in elements O soul! be changed into small water drops, And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found So will, unknown to him, the very same thoughts be expressed by an English poet of a later day.[94] Dialogues are not rare in these poems, but they generally differ very much from the familiar dialogue of the Celts. They are mostly epic in character, lyric in tone, with abrupt apostrophes causing the listener to start, like the sudden sound of a trumpet. When the idea is more fully developed the dialogue becomes a succession of discourses, full of eloquence and power sometimes, but still discourses. We are equally far in both cases from the conversational style so frequent in the Irish stories.[95]