h its
first appearance in history. But of England and the Teutonic race what
shall one say? A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
the political, and social conditions of life. Freedom and deathless
courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages. In
the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race. In the Faust
legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
attains a supreme embodiment. In the Oriental imagination the sense of
the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
apathy or despair. But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
rather than the hope upon which his life is set.

This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
and Teutonic literature, and even in action. The spirit which
originates the _Voelker-wanderung_, for instance, reappears in the
half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
the crusades. They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.

Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
Teutonic race.

And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
devotion of the saint, the scholar