for above three hundred
years. We can hope only that the jungles were getting cleared a little,
and the wild creatures hunted down; that the Germans were increasing
in number, and becoming a thought less shaggy. These latter, tall Suevi
Semnones, men of blond stern aspect _(oculi truces coerulei)_ and
great strength of bone, were known to possess a formidable talent for
fighting: [Tacitus, _De Moribus Germanorum,_ c. 45.] Drusus Germanicus,
it has been guessed, did not like to appear personally among them: some
"gigantic woman prophesying to him across the Elbe" that it might be
dangerous, Drusus contented himself with erecting some triumphal pillar
on his own safe side of the Elbe, to say that they were conquered.

In the Fourth Century of our era, when the German populations, on
impulse of certain "Huns expelled from the Chinese frontier," or for
other reasons valid to themselves, began flowing universally southward,
to take possession of the rich Roman world, and so continued flowing for
two centuries more; the old German frontiers generally, and especially
those Northern Baltic countries, were left comparatively vacant; so that
new immigrating populations from the East, all of Sclavic origin, easily
obtained footing and supremacy there. In the Northern parts, these
immigrating Sclaves were of the kind called Vandals, or Wends: they
spread themselves as far west as Hamburg and the Ocean, south also
far over the Elbe in some quarters; while other kinds of Sclaves
were equally busy elsewhere. With what difficulty in settling the new
boundaries, and what inexhaustible funds of quarrel thereon, is still
visible to every one, though no Historian was there to say the least
word of it. "All of Sclavic origin;" but who knows of how many kinds:
Wends here in the North, through the Lausitz (Lusatia) and as far as
Thuringen; not to speak of Polacks, Bohemian Czechs, Huns, Bulgars, and
the other dim nomenclatures, on the Eastern frontier. Five hundred
years of violent unrecorded fighting, abstruse quarrel with their new
neighbors in settling the marches. Many names of towns in Germany ending
in ITZ (Meuselwitz, Mollwitz), or bearing the express epithet _Windisch_
(Wendish), still give indication of those old sad circumstances; as
does the word SLAVE, in all our Western languages, meaning captured
SCLAVONIAN. What long-drawn echo of bitter rage and hate lies in that
small etymology!

These things were; but they have no History: