g souls.

One pities them, I say. And they pitied themselves. Remorse, shame,
sadness, mark the few legends and songs of the days which followed the
fall of Rome. They had done a great work. They had destroyed a mighty
tyranny; they had parted between them the spoils wrung from all the
nations; they had rid the earth of a mighty man-devouring ogre, whose
hands had been stretched out for centuries over all the earth, dragging
all virgins to his den, butchering and torturing thousands for his sport;
foul, too, with crimes for which their language, like our own (thank God)
has scarcely found a name. Babylon the Great, drunken with the blood of
the saints, had fallen at last before the simple foresters of the north:
but if it looks a triumph to us, it looked not such to them. They could
only think how they had stained their hands in their brothers' blood.
They had got the fatal Nibelungen hoard: but it had vanished between
their hands, and left them to kill each other, till none was left.

You know the Nibelungen Lied? That expresses, I believe, the key-note of
the old Teuton's heart, after his work was done. Siegfried murdered by
his brother-in-law; fair Chriemhild turned into an avenging fury; the
heroes hewing each other down, they scarce know why, in Hunnish Etzel's
hall, till Hagen and Gunther stand alone; Dietrich of Bern going in, to
bind the last surviving heroes; Chriemhild shaking Hagen's gory head in
Gunther's face, himself hewed down by the old Hildebrand, till nothing is
left but stark corpses and vain tears:--while all the while the
Nibelungen hoard, the cause of all the woe, lies drowned in the deep
Rhine until the judgment day.--What is all this, but the true tale of the
fall of Rome, of the mad quarrels of the conquering Teutons? The names
are confused, mythic; the dates and places all awry: but the tale is
true--too true. Mutato nomine fabula narratur. Even so they went on,
killing, till none were left. Deeds as strange, horrible, fratricidal,
were done, again and again, not only between Frank and Goth, Lombard and
Gepid, but between Lombard and Lombard, Frank and Frank. Yes, they were
drunk with each other's blood, those elder brethren of ours. Let us
thank God that we did not share their booty, and perish, like them, from
the touch of the fatal Nibelungen hoard. Happy for us Englishmen, that
we were forced to seek our adventures here, in this lonely isle; to turn
aside from the great strea