The best Christian poem, called "Crist," is full of the happiness bestowed by the new religion. The verses are by a poet named Cynewulf of whom nothing is known but his name, recorded in a kind of acrostic written in the Runic alphabet. He took his matter from sermons and hymns in Latin, but Cynewulf makes the poetry his own. He is joyously religious. After all the melancholy of the heathen or half-heathen minstrels, their wistful doubts about the meaning and value of our little life, the author of the "Crist" comes as one who "has seen a great light". He rejoices like the shepherds who heard good tidings of great joy at Bethlehem on the first Christmas night. It is as when spring comes to the world and the thrushes cannot have enough of singing: the night and the darkness are over: the grave has lost its sting and Death his victory. The poet is as happy as the birds in March. To him the message of Christ is no old story, but a new certainty; he has no doubt, no fear, and this gladness of faith is all his own, whether he sings of Our Lord or of Our Lady. That is the charm of Cynewulf; his fresh delight in his work. Thou to us The bright sun sendest, And thyself comest, That thou may'st enlighten Those who long ago With vapour covered, And in darkness here Sat, in continual night. The legends of "St. Guthlac" and "St. Juliana," on the other hand, are not, it must be confessed, such spontaneous bursts of song. Andreas. In the "Andreas" the poet, whoever he was, sings of what he has heard, adventures of St. Andrew and St. Mark. St. Matthew has fallen into the hands of the cannibals of old Greek legend, the Læstrygonians, the poet calls them the "Mermedonians".[3] The cannibals have caught, and are about to eat St. Matthew, but the Lord appears first to him, in his dungeon, and then to St. Andrew, who is living among the Achæans, in Greece. The voyage, the fighting, are in the old heathen style, and the Deity appears with two angels, all three disguised as sailors. It is impossible to give the whole tale, which appealed to the natural man as a great story of adventure in waves and war, while it introduced religion. The adventures are many, and much more startling and wild than any that survive from the Anglo-Saxon poetry of heathen times. Dream of the Rood.