Before the inevitable journey becomes not any
Thought more wise than (that) it is needful for him,
To consider, ere his hence-going,
What, to his ghost, of good or ill,
After death-day, doomed may be.
But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its West-Saxon form,
the earliest literary remains of which date to the 9th century, when
under the political supremacy of Wessex and the scholarship of King
Alfred it became the literary language of the English nation, the
classical "Anglo-Saxon." If our materials were more extensive, it would
probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several periods; as
it is, considerable differences have been shown to exist between the
"early West-Saxon" of King Alfred and the later language of the 11th
century, the earlier language having numerous phonetic and inflectional
distinctions which are "levelled" in the later, the inflectional changes
showing that the tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical
stage existed quite independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern
dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th century by
the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form of glosses to
the Latin gospels and a service-book, often called the _Ritual of
Durham_, where we find that, owing to the confusion which had so long
reigned in the north, and to special Northumbrian tendencies, e.g. the
dropping of the inflectional n in both verbs and nouns, this dialect had
advanced in the process of inflection-levelling far beyond the sister
dialects of Mercian and the south, so as already to anticipate the forms
of Early Middle English.
Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned the epic
poem of Beowulf, the original nucleus of which has been supposed to date
to heathen and even continental times, though we now possess it only in
a later form; the poetical works of Cynewulf; those formerly ascribed to
Caedmon; several works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of
Orosius and of _The Pastoral Care_ of St Gregory, are contemporary
specimens of his language; the Old English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the
theological works of Aelfric (including translations of the Pentateuch
and the gospels) and of Wulfstan; and many works both in prose and
verse, of which the authors are unknown.
The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle
crosses, are in a Runic character; but the letters used in the
manuscripts generally are a British variety of the Roman alphabet which
the Anglo-Saxons found in the island, and which was also used by the
Welsh and Irish.[7] Several of the Roman letters had in Britain
developed forms, and retained or acquired values, unlike those used on
the continent, in particular [glyphs] (d f g r s t). The letters _q_
and _z_ were not used, _q_ being represented by _cw_, and _k_ was a rare
alternative to _c_; _u_ or _v_ was only a vowel, the consonantal power
of _v_ being represented as in Welsh by _f_. The Runes called _thorn_
and _wen_, having the consonantal values now expressed by _th_ and _w_,
for which the Roman alphabet had no character, were at first expressed
by _th_, dh (a contraction for [g][g] or [g]h), and _v_ or _u_; but at a
later period the characters th and [p] were revived from the old Runic
alphabet. Contrary to Continental usage, the letters _c_ and [g] (_g_)
had originally only their hard or guttural powers, as in the
neighbouring Celtic languages; so that words which, when the Continental
Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic languages, had to be written
with _k_, were in Old English written with _c_, as _cene_ = keen,
_cynd_ = kind.[8] The key to the values of the letters, and thus to the
pronunciation of Old English, is also to be found in the Celtic tongues
whence the letters were taken.
The Old English period is usually considered as terminating 1120, with
the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest. The Conquest
established in England a foreign court, a foreign aristocracy and a
foreign hierarchy.[9] The French language, in its Norman dialect, became
the only polite medium of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not
only as unknown but as the language of a subject race, was left to the
use of boors and serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be
written at all. The natural results followed.[10] When the educated
generation that saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language,
ceasing to be read and written, lost all its literary words. The words
of ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on as
vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those that related to
science, art and higher culture, the bold artistic compounds, the
figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The practical
vocabulary shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And when,
generations later, English began to be used for general literature, the
only terms at hand to express ideas above those of every-day life were
to be found in the French of the privileged classes, of whom alone art,
science, law and theology had been for generations the inheritance.
Hence each successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue
showed a larger adoption of French words to supply the place of the
forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted a
notable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being only that
the French words affected the English vocabulary. The Norman French
words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the Central or Parisian
French words which followed under the early Plantagenets, were mainly
Latin words which had lived on among the people of Gaul, and, modified
in the mouths of succeeding generations, had reached forms more or less
remote from their originals. In being now adopted as English, they
supplied precedents in accordance with which other Latin words might be
converted into English ones, whenever required; and long before the
Renascence of classical learning, though in much greater numbers after
that epoch, these precedents were freely followed.
While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest was thus
a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, the grammar of the
language was not directly affected by it. There was no reason why it
should--we might almost add, no way by which it could. While the English
used their own _words_, they could not forget their own _way_ of using
them, the inflections and constructions by which alone the words
expressed ideas--in other words, their grammar; when one by one French
words were introduced into the sentence they became English by the very
act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and
liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of course
precisely what happens at the present day: _telegraph_ and _telegram_
make participle _telegraphing_ and plural _telegrams_, and _naive_ the
adverb _naively_, precisely as if they had been in the language for
ages.
But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in
the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must be pronounced
with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas; it
is all-important to hear whether a word is _bonus_ or _bonis_ or _bonas_
or _bonos_. This implies a measured and distinct pronunciation, against
which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is continually
struggling, while indolence and carelessness continually compromise it.
In the Germanic languages, as a whole, the main stress-accent falls on
the radical syllable, or on the prefix of a nominal compound, and thus
at or near the beginning of the word; and the result of this in English
has been a growing tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall
into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney _winder_, _sofer_,
_holler_, _Sarer_, _Sunder_, _would yer_, for wind_ow_, sof_a_, holl_a_,
Sar_ah_, Sund_ay_, would y_ou_, the various final vowels sinking into an
obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt _er_, but formerly
represented by final _e_. Already before the Conquest, forms originally
_hatu_, _sello_, _tunga_, appeared as _hate_, _selle_, _tunge_, with the
terminations levelled to obscure e; but during the illiterate period of
the language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal
vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable
(except _i_) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change
was going on, we see a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full
inflections of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence
with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the
language that the names _Transition_ and _Period of Confusion_ (Dr
Abbott's appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon
broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if
not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.
Although the written remains of the transition stage are few, sufficient
exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic change in some of
the dialects. Within three generations after the Conquest, faithful pens
were at work transliterating the old homilies of Aelfric, and other
lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church, into the current idiom of their
posterity.[11] Twice during the period, in the reigns of Stephen and
Henry II., Aelfric's gospels were similarly modernized so as to be
"understanded of the people."[12] Homilies and other religious works of
the end of the 12th century[13] show us the change still further
advanced, and the language passing into Early Middle English in its
southern form. While these southern remains carry on in unbroken
sequence the history of the Old English of Alfred and Aelfric, the
history of the northern English is an entire blank from the 11th to the
13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the terrible
retaliation inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English
culture for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the
kingdom of Scotland during the same period, it probably perished during
the calamities to which that country was subjected during the
half-century of struggle for independence. In reality, however, the
northern English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries
earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish inroads
had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman Conquest in the
south.
Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter of
England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of north and
south alike, and become the English of the future. The Mercian kingdom,
which, as its name imports, lay along the _marches_ of the earlier
states, and was really a congeries of the outlying members of many
tribes, must have presented from the beginning a linguistic mixture and
transition; and it is evident that more than one intermediate form of
speech arose within its confines, between Lancashire and the Thames. The
specimens of early Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses,
in a mixed Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century;
but, in a 9th-century gloss, the so-called Vespasian Psalter,
representing what is generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the
close of the Old English period we find some portions of a gloss to the
Rushworth Gospels, namely St Matthew and a few verses of St John xviii.,
to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters and one or two
small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which in many respects
stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish, approaching the one or
the other more nearly as we have to do with North Mercian or South
Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find an undoubted midland
dialect in the transition stage from Old to Middle English, in the
eastern part of ancient Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and
south-east by the Saxon Middlesex and Essex, and on the east and north
by the East Anglian Norfolk and Suffolk and the Danish settlements on
the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the monastery of
Peterborough, one of the copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
transcribed about 1120, was continued by two succeeding hands to the
death of Stephen in 1154. The section from 1122 to 1131, probably
written in the latter year, shows a notable confusion between Old
English forms and those of a Middle English, impatient to rid itself of
the inflectional trammels which were still, though in weakened forms, so
faithfully retained south of the Thames. And in the concluding section,
containing the annals from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the
latter year, we find Middle English fairly started on its career. A
specimen of this new tongue will best show the change that had taken
place:
1140 A.D.--_And_[14] te eorl of Angaeu waerd ded, and his sune Henri
toc to the rice. And te cuen of France to-daelde fra the king, and
scae co_m_ to the iunge eorl Henri. _and_ he toc hire to wiue, _and_
al Peitou mid hire. tha ferde he mid micel faerd into Engleland _and_
wan castles--_and_ te king ferde agenes hi_m_ mid micel mare ferd.
thothwaethere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden the aerceb_iscop and_ te wise
men betwux heo_m_, and makede _that_ sahte _that_ te king sculde ben
lauerd _and_ king wile he liuede. _and_ aeft_er_ his daei ware Henri
king. _and_ he helde hi_m_ for fader, _and_ he hi_m_ for sune, _and_
sib and saehte sculde ben betwyx heo_m_, and on al Engleland.[15]
With this may be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from 10 to
20 years later (Hatton Gospels, Luke i. 46[16]):
Da cwaedh Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast geblissode on
gode minen haelende. For tham the he geseah his thinene eadmodnysse.
Sodhlice henen-fordh me eadige seggedh alle cneornesse; for tham the
me mychele thing dyde se the mihtyg ys; _and_ his name is halig. _And_
his mildheortnysse of cneornisse on cneornesse hine ondraedende. He
worhte maegne on hys earme; he to-daelde tha ofermode, on moda heora
heortan. He warp tha rice of setlle, and tha eadmode he up-an-hof.
Hyngriende he mid gode ge-felde, _and_ tha ofermode ydele for-let. He
afeng israel his cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he spraec
to ure faederen, Abrahame _and_ his saede on a weorlde.
To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the versified
chronicle of Layamon or Laweman, a priest of Ernely on the Severn, who,
using as his basis the French _Brut_ of Wace, expanded it by additions
from other sources to more than twice the extent: his work of 32,250
lines is a mine of illustration for the language of his time and
locality. The latter was intermediate between midland and southern, and
the language, though forty years later than the specimen from the
Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and can scarcely be
considered even as Early Middle English. The following is a specimen
(lines 9064-9079):
On Kinbelines daeie ... the king wes inne Bruttene, com a thissen
middel aerde ... anes maidenes sune, iboren wes in Bethleem ... of
bezste alre burden. He is ihaten Jesu Crist ... thurh thene halie
gost, alre worulde wunne ... walden englenne; faeder he is on heuenen
... froure moncunnes; sune he is on eordhen ... of sele thon maeidene,
& thene halie gost ... haldedh mid him seoluen.
The MIDDLE ENGLISH was pre-eminently the _Dialectal_ period of the
language. It was not till after the middle of the 14th century that
English obtained official recognition. For three centuries, therefore,
there was no standard form of speech which claimed any pre-eminence over
the others. The writers of each district wrote in the dialect familiar
to them; and between extreme forms the difference was so great as to
amount to unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had
to be translated for the benefit of the men of the north:--
"In sotherin Inglis was it drawin,
And turnid ic haue it till ur awin
Langage of the northin lede
That can na nothir Inglis rede."
_Cursor Mundi_, 20,064.
Three main dialects were distinguished by contemporary writers, as in
the often-quoted passage from Trevisa's translation of Higden's
_Polychronicon_ completed in 1387:--
"Also Englysche men ... hadde fram the bygynnynge thre maner speche,
Southeron, Northeron _and_ Myddel speche (in the myddel of the lond)
as hy come of thre maner people of Germania.... Also of the forseyde
Saxon tonge, that ys deled a thre, and ys abyde scarslyche with feaw
uplondysche men _and_ ys gret wondur, for men of the est with men of
the west, as hyt were under the same part of heyvene, acordeth more in
sounynge of stheche than men of the north with men of the south;
therfore hyt ys that Mercii, that buth men of myddel Engelond, as hyt
were parteners of the endes, undurstondeth betre the syde longages
Northeron and Southeron, than Northern _and_ Southern undurstondeth
oyther other."
The modern study of these Middle English dialects, initiated by the
elder Richard Garnett, scientifically pursued by Dr Richard Morris, and
elaborated by many later scholars, both English and German, has shown
that they were readily distinguished by the conjugation of the present
tense of the verb, which in typical specimens was as follows:---
_Southern._
Ich singe. We singeth.
Thou singest. [Gh]e singeth.
He singeth. Hy singeth.
_Midland._
Ich, I, singe. We singen.
Thou singest. [Gh]e singen.
He singeth. Hy, thei, singen.
_Northern._
Ic. I, sing(e) (I that singes). We sing(e). We that synges.
Thu singes. [Gh]e sing(e), [Gh]e foules synges.
He singes. Thay sing(e). Men synges.
Of these the southern is simply the old West-Saxon, with the vowels
levelled to _e_. The northern second person in _-es_ preserves an older
form than the southern and West-Saxon _-est_; but the _-es_ of the third
person and plural is derived from an older _-eth_, the change of _-th_
into _-s_ being found in progress in the Durham glosses of the 10th
century. In the plural, when accompanied by the pronoun subject, the
verb had already dropped the inflections entirely as in Modern English.
The origin of the _-en_ plural in the midland dialect, unknown to Old
English, is probably an instance of _form-levelling_, the inflection of
the present indicative being assimilated to that of the past, and the
present and past subjunctive, in all of which _-en_ was the plural
termination. In the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, the
northern dialect had attained before the end of the 13th century to the
simplicity of Modern English, while the southern dialect still retained
a large number of inflections, and the midland a considerable number.
The dialects differed also in phonology, for while the northern
generally retained the hard or guttural values of _k_, _g_, _sc_, these
were in the two other dialects palatalized before front vowels into
_ch_, _j_ and _sh_. _Kirk_, _chirche_ or _church_, _bryg_, _bridge_;
_scryke_, _shriek_, are examples. Old English _hw_ was written in the
north _qu_(h), but elsewhere _wh_, often sinking into _w_. The original
long _a_ in _stan_, _mar_, preserved in the northern _stane_, _mare_,
became _o_ elsewhere, as in _stone_, _more_. So that the north presented
a general aspect of conservation of old sounds with the most
thorough-going dissolution of old inflections; the south, a tenacious
retention of the inflections, with an extensive evolution in the sounds.
In one important respect, however, phonetic decay was far ahead in the
north: the final e to which all the old vowels had been levelled during
the transition stage, and which is a distinguishing feature of Middle
English in the midland and southern dialects, became mute, _i.e._,
disappeared, in the northern dialect before that dialect emerged from
its three centuries of obscuration, shortly before 1300. So thoroughly
modern had its form consequently become that we might almost call it
Modern English, and say that the Middle English stage of the northern
dialect is lost. For comparison with the other dialects, however, the
same nomenclature may be used, and we may class as Middle English the
extensive literature which northern England produced during the 14th
century. The earliest specimen is probably the Metrical Psalter in the
Cotton Library,[17] copied during the reign of Edward II. from an
original of the previous century. The gigantic versified paraphrase of
Scripture history called the _Cursor Mundi_,[18] is held also to have
been composed before 1300. The dates of the numerous alliterative
romances in this dialect have not been determined with exactness, as all
survive in later copies, but it is probable that some of them were
written before 1300. In the 14th century appeared the theological and
devotional works of Richard Rolle the anchorite of Hampole, Dan Jon
Gaytrigg, William of Nassington, and other writers whose names are
unknown; and towards the close of the century, specimens of the language
also appear from Scotland both in official documents and in the poetical
works of John Barbour, whose language, barring minute points of
orthography, is identical with that of the contemporary northern English
writers. From 1400 onward, the distinction between northern English and
Lowland Scottish becomes clearly marked.
In the southern dialect one version of the work called the _Ancren
Riwle_ or "Rule of Nuns," adapted about 1225 for a small sisterhood at
Tarrant-Kaines, in Dorsetshire, exhibits a dialectal characteristic
which had probably long prevailed in the south, though concealed by the
spelling, in the use of _v_ for _f_, as _valle_ fall, _vordonne_ fordo,
_vorto_ for to, _veder_ father, _vrom_ from. Not till later do we find a
recognition of the parallel use of _z_ for _s_. Among the writings which
succeed, _The Owl and the Nightingale_ of Nicholas de Guildford, of
Portesham in Dorsetshire, before 1250, the _Chronicle_ of Robert of
Gloucester, 1298, and Trevisa's translation of Higden, 1387, are of
special importance in illustrating the history of southern English. The
earliest form of Langland's _Piers Ploughman_, 1362, as preserved in the
Vernon MS., appears to be in an intermediate dialect between southern
and midland.[19] The Kentish form of southern English seems to have
retained specially archaic features; five short sermons in it of the
middle of the 13th century were edited by Dr Morris (1866); but the
great work illustrating it is the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ (Remorse of
Conscience), 1340,[20] a translation from the French by Dan Michel of
Northgate, Kent, who tells us--
"Thet this boc is y-write mid engliss of Kent;
This boc is y-mad uor lewede men,
Vor uader, and uor moder, and uor other ken,
Ham uor to ber[gh]e uram alle manyere zen,
Thet ine hare inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen."
In its use of _v_ (_u_) and _z_ for [s] and _s_, and its grammatical
inflections, it presents an extreme type of southern speech, with
peculiarities specially Kentish; and in comparison with contemporary
Midland English works, it looks like a fossil of two centuries earlier.
Turning from the dialectal extremes of the Middle English to the midland
speech, which we left at the closing leaves of the Peterborough
_Chronicle_ of 1154, we find a rapid development of this dialect, which
was before long to become the national literary language. In this, the
first great work is the _Ormulum_, or metrical Scripture paraphrase of
Orm or Ormin, written about 1200, somewhere near the northern frontier
of the midland area. The dialect has a decided smack of the north, and
shows for the first time in English literature a large percentage of
Scandinavian words, derived from the Danish settlers, who, in adopting
English, had preserved a vast number of their ancestral forms of speech,
which were in time to pass into the common language, of which they now
constitute some of the most familiar words. _Blunt_, _bull_, _die_,
_dwell_, _ill_, _kid_, _raise_, _same_, _thrive_, _wand_, _wing_, are
words from this source, which appear first in the work of Orm, of which
the following lines may be quoted:--
"The Judewisshe folkess boc
hemm se[gh][gh]de, thatt hemm birrde
Twa bukkes samenn to the preost
att kirrke-dure brinngenn;
_And_ te[gh][gh] tha didenn blitheli[gh],
swa summ the boc hemm tahhte,
And brohhtenn twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess thaer
Drihhtin thaerwithth to lakenn.
And att[21] te kirrke-dure toc
the preost ta twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess,
_And_ o thatt an he le[gh][gh]de thaer
all the[gh][gh]re sake _and_ sinne,
_And_ let itt eornenn for thwithth all
ut inntill wilde wesste;
_And_ toc _and_ snath thatt otherr bucc
Drihhtin thaerwithth to lakenn.
All thiss wass don forr here ned,
_and_ ec forr ure nede;
For hemm itt hallp biforenn Godd
to clennssenn hemm of sinne;
_And_ all swa ma[gh][gh] itt hellpenn the
[gh]iff thatt tu willt [itt] foll[gh]henn.
[Gh]iff thatt tu willt full innwarrdli[gh]
withth fulle trowwthe lefenn
All thatt tatt wass bitacnedd taer,
to lefenn _and_ to trowwenn."
_Ormulum_, ed. White, l. 1324.
The author of the _Ormulum_ was a phonetist, and employed a special
spelling of his own to represent not only the quality but the
_quantities_ of vowels and consonants--a circumstance which gives his
work a peculiar value to the investigator. He is generally assumed to
have been a native of Lincolnshire or Notts, but the point is a disputed
one, and there is somewhat to be said for the neighbourhood of Ormskirk
in Lancashire.
It is customary to differentiate between east and west midland, and to
subdivide these again into north and south. As was natural in a tract of
country which stretched from Lancaster to Essex, a very considerable
variety is found in the documents which agree in presenting the leading
midland features, those of Lancashire and Lincolnshire approaching the
northern dialect both in vocabulary, phonetic character and greater
neglect of inflections. But this diversity diminishes as we advance.
Thirty years after the _Ormulum_, the east midland rhymed _Story of
Genesis and Exodus_[22] shows us the dialect in a more southern form,
with the vowels of modern English, and from about the same date, with
rather more northern characteristics, we have an east midland
_Bestiary_.
Different tests and different dates have been proposed for subdividing
the Middle English period, but the most important is that of Henry
Nicol, based on the observation that in the early 13th century, as in
Ormin, the Old English short vowels in an open syllable still retained
their short quantity, as _nama_, _over_, _mete_; but by 1250 or 1260
they had been lengthened to _na-me_, _o-ver_, _me-te_, a change which
has also taken place at a particular period in all the Germanic, and
even the Romanic languages, as in _buo-no_ for _bo-num_, _pa-dre_ for
_pa-trem_, &c. The lengthening of the penult left the final syllable by
contrast shortened or weakened, and paved the way for the disappearance
of final e in the century following, through the stages _na-me_,
_na-me_, _na-m'_, _nam_, the one long syllable in _nam(e)_ being the
quantitative equivalent of the two short syllables in _na-me_; hence the
notion that mute _e_ makes a preceding vowel long, the truth being that
the lengthening of the vowel led to the e becoming mute.
After 1250 we have the _Lay of Havelok_, and about 1300 the writings of
Robert of Brunne in South Lincolnshire. In the 14th century we find a
number of texts belonging to the western part of the district.
South-west midland is hardly to be distinguished from southern in its
south-western form, and hence texts like _Piers Plowman_ elude any
satisfactory classification, but several metrical romances exhibit what
are generally considered to be west midland characteristics, and a
little group of poems, _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knighte_, the _Pearl_,
_Cleanness_ and _Patience_, thought to be the work of a north-west
midland writer of the 14th century, bear a striking resemblance to the
modern Lancashire dialect. The end of the century witnessed the prose of
Wycliff and Mandeville, and the poetry of Chaucer, with whom Middle
English may be said to have culminated, and in whose writings its main
characteristics as distinct from Old and Modern English may be studied.
Thus, we find final e in full use representing numerous original vowels
and terminations as
Him thoughte that his herte wolde breke,
in Old English--
Him thuhte thaet his heorte wolde brecan,
which may be compared with the modern German--
Ihm dauchte dass sein Herze wollte brechen.