days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America
discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present
language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from
papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque
and poignant features of the historical landscape.

These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into
compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men,
women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now,
in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain.
The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from
Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the
Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on
the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home
tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile
stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in
Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating
the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting,
building, poetry, and music.

France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew
out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly
included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.

As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is
their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to
Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem
thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that,
setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of
England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as
dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?"

One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German
invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish,
of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These
are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not
difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according
as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as
they occupied themselves differently.

The observant traveller in the United States, may see for himself what
differences even a few years of differing climate, and circumstances,
and