PART I.-THE FIRST PERIOD OF BLOOM. CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNINGS. The German tongue belongs to the great Aryan family of languages. At a time very remote, the parent speech from which it was derived - from which too were derived in the East the Sanscrit and the Persian, and in the West the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, and the Sclavonic-was spoken somewhere upon the highlands in Central Asia, or perhaps upon a continent, now submerged, lying to the south of Asia, of which the great island-world of Oceanica is a remainder.1 From indications contained in the descendant languages we may know that the primeval tribe was not utterly rude. Perhaps it was due to a certain degree of civilization they reached that they gained the upper-hand in the early world. At any rate, they multiplied, swarmed forth from their homes, sent emigrants to people India, and westward to take possession of Europe. The Hellenic race, developed from these, plays its part in Greece; as its force expires, the Italic race, in the neighboring peninsula, establishes the glory of Rome. This in turn culminates and decays. Then step upon the scene the Teutons, whose empire was to last far longer, perhaps to be far mightier 1 Ernst Haeckel: Schöpfungsgeschichte. and more brilliant, than its predecessors; to what extent grander we cannot say, for the end is not yet. The name German, full of picturesque suggestion as it is," Shouters in battle," occurs first in Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ. They were fully established in Europe when history begins; yet we cannot assign their immigration to a very ancient date, for at our first knowledge of them the remembrance of their former home remains vivid in the people, expressed in legends, institutions, and social customs. In the time of Alexander the Great, Pytheas of Massilia, a wandering merchant of that colony of Greece, having reached the Baltic shore, gives some account of the Teutons and Guthons; he was, however, not believed by the writers of his time. It is probable that the Germanic wave, sweeping into Europe from the East, had poured across Russia and thence into Scandinavia, and was now beginning to work southward. Again there is a period of silence until the second century before Christ, when Papirius Carbo, a Roman consul appointed to fight with the Celts in Noricum, comes unexpectedly upon an enemy far more powerful, a vast migrating people, whose men are of huge strength and fierce courage, whose women are scarcely less formidable, whose children are white-haired, like people grown aged, and are bold-eyed and vigorous. Upon their great white shields they slide down the slopes of the Alps to do battle; they have armor of brass and helmets fashioned into a resemblance of the heads of beasts of prey. The women fight by the side of their husbands; then, as priestesses, slay the prisoners, letting the blood run into brazen caldrons that it may afford Even the Romans are terrified, veterans an omen. though they are from the just-ended struggle with Hannibal. Papirius Carbo goes down before them, and Rome expects to see in her streets the blond Northman, as she has just before looked for the darkskinned Numidian. Caius Marius meets them, 100 B. C., in Southern Gaul, and again in Northern Italy, the front rank of their host-that they may stand firm-bound together, man by man, with a chain, and the fierce women waiting in the rear with uplifted axes to slay all cowards. But Marius comes off conqueror from the corpse-heaped battle-fields, and Rome has a respite. Within half a century they grapple with the legionaries again, who this time have in their van the sternest heart and strongest head of his great race, Julius Cæsar; and henceforth, for five centuries, there is scarcely an intermission in the wrestle. Drusus, Germanicus, Varus, Claudius, Julian, Valens these are Roman names that sound as we go down the ages, made memorable by struggle-sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous — with the shouters in battle; Ariovistus, Arminius, Maroboduus, Alaric, Chnodomar, Theodoric — these are the confronting Goths. Dealing blows almost as heavy as he receives, at length the Roman is beaten to his knees, the strength of the vanquished, as in the struggles of fable, passing into the body of the victor. As he drops the sceptre it is seized by the Goth, who becomes imbued moreover with his civilization and his faith; strengthened and ennobled by the gain, he shapes the modern world. Tacitus, writing in the first century after Christ, with the desire to bring back his degenerating countrymen to nobler standards, portrays for their admiration the Germans, as a purer people. His representation is held to be in all its main traits an accurate one, and is the first extended account. Tacitus speaks of songs sung in honor of the god Tuisco and his son Mannus, of battle-hymns and lays intended for the expression of joy. There was among the Germans no special class of singers like the bards of the Celts, or the scalds of the Scandinavians; minstrelsy was a universal gift among the people. They were not utter barbarians; with several other arts, they understood the use of runes,—a modification of picture-writing. The songs of which the Roman writer speaks have perished, but, as will be seen, not without leaving some trace of themselves in the poetry of the race. Christianity, upon its introduction, destroyed their religion, in a measure, their nationality. The songs were the clamps which, more strongly than anything else, fastened to them their old heathenism. The missionaries who converted them did what they could to bring these lays into oblivion, encountering them all the more bitterly perhaps because they themselves were to a large extent of a different, often hostile, stock, Celts, from the island of Britain. At Upsala, in Sweden, is preserved a venerable relic, the chief treasure of the library of the university. It is a book of purple vellum, whose pages, blackened and mildewed though they are, are still sumptuous, and retain, plainly legible, the charac |