ning _reveille_ of the great Christian nations--England, France,
Spain, Lombardy--were sounding to quarters. Franks had knit into one the
rudiments of a great kingdom upon the soil of France; the Saxons and
Angles, with some Vandals, had, through a whole century, been defiling
by vast trains into the great island which they were called by
Providence to occupy and to ennoble; the Vandals had seated themselves,
though in this case only with no definite hopes, along the extreme
region of the Barbary States. Vandals might and did survive for a
considerable period in ineffective fragments, but not as a power. The
Visigoths had quartered themselves on Spain, there soon to begin a
conflict for the Cross, and to maintain it for eight hundred years, and
finally to prevail. And lastly, the Lombards had thrown a network of
colonization over Italy, which, as much by the cohesions which it shook
loose and broke asunder as by the new one which it bred, exhibited a
power like that of the coral insects, and gave promise of a new empire
built out of floating dust and fragments.

The movements which formerly had resembled those gigantic pillars of
sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind
in the great deserts--suddenly showing themselves upon the remote
horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward
towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach,
manoeuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse,
fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other
travellers--have passed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been
abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had crossed the vast barriers
of Western Europe--the Alps, the Vosges, the Pyrenees, the ocean--these
were now the wards within which they had committed their hopes and the
graves of their fathers. Social developments tended to the same, and no
longer either wishing or finding it possible to roam, they were all now,
through an entire century, taking up their ground and making good their
tumultuous irruptions; with the power of moving had been conjoined a
propensity to move. Rustic life, which must essentially have been
maintained on the great area of German vagrancy, was more and more
confirmed.

With this physical impossibility of roaming, and with the reciprocal
compression of each exercised on the other, coincided the new instincts
of civilization. They were no longer barbarou