hat you promised me among those distant
palaces? Do I behold you carrying that destruction through the
dwellings of Rome, which the soldiers of yonder city carried through
the dwellings of the Goths? Is it for plunder or for glory that the
army is here? I thought, in my woman's delusion, that it was for
revenge!'

'Dishonour will avenge you--Famine will avenge you--Pestilence will
avenge you!'

'They will avenge my nation; they will not avenge me. I have seen the
blood of Gothic women spilt around me--I have looked on my children's
corpses bleeding at my feet! Will a famine that I cannot see, and a
pestilence that I cannot watch, give me vengeance for this? Look!
Here is the helmet-crest of my husband and your brother--the
helmet-crest that was flung to me as a witness that the Romans had
slain him! Since the massacre of Aquileia it has never quitted my
bosom. I have sworn that the blood which stains and darkens it, shall
be washed off in the blood of the people of Rome. Though I should
perish under those accursed walls; though you in your soulless patience
should refuse me protection and aid; I, widowed, weakened, forsaken as
I am, will hold to the fulfilment of my oath!'

As she ceased she folded the crest in her mantle, and turned abruptly
from Hermanric in bitter and undissembled scorn. All the attributes of
her sex, in thought, expression, and manner, seemed to have deserted
her. The very tones she spoke in were harsh and unwomanly.

Every word she had uttered, every action she had displayed, had sunk
into the inmost heart, had stirred the fiercest passions of the young
warrior whom she addressed. The first national sentiment discoverable
in the day-spring of the ages of Gothic history, is the love of war;
but the second is the reverence of woman. This latter
feeling--especially remarkable among so fierce and unsusceptible a
people as the ancient Scandinavians--was entirely unconnected with
those strong attaching ties, which are the natural consequence of the
warm temperaments of more southern nations; for love was numbered with
the base inferior passions, in the frigid and hardy composition of the
warrior of the north. It was the offspring of reasoning and
observation, not of instinctive sentiment and momentary impulse. In
the wild, poetical code of the old Gothic superstition was one axiom,
closely and strangely approximating to an important theory in the
Christian scheme--the watchfulness of