who is unfit for abstract
thought, created the "divine arts" poetry, music, architecture, in the
progressive sequence of the centuries of German history.

In religious symbolism lies the root of Romanticism, the blossom of
mediaeval life: Romanticism, a Romance word in sound, is German in
spirit. Its soul is the romantic ideal of love: woman is its centre. It
radiates first from a fervent soul with an ecstatic, passionate devotion
to the Christian _Allmutter_, the mother of God, the Holy Virgin, Saint
Mary, who was from the first deeply revered by the Teutons, owing to
their inherent veneration for woman. Among the Germans of all times,
even the most corrupted and dissolute, this spark of veneration is not
entirely extinct. Love is surrounded with a halo in contrast with the
severe Oriental treatment of women by the Church Fathers. The harsh
words of the Gospels, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!" is
transformed into: "Pure woman, and mother mine!"

Thus the picture drawn by the Edda truly called the Norse Bible of the
Teutonic race of the doomsday of the world, the _Gotterdammerung_, is
nothing if not a representation of the whirl of the immigration. Yet all
that is valuable, culturally speaking, rises like a phoenix from the
ashes. As, in the ingenious words of the poet, "Conquered Greece
conquered, on her part, the fierce Roman conqueror and carried her
(intellectual) arms into Latium," so conquered Rome transformed the
fierce Germanic conqueror into a new man. The unity of the Roman Empire
had furthered Christianity, and the complete German conquest mightily
influenced the entire Germanic race in the direction of Romanization and
Christianization, though the latter for long remained crude and was
affected by the cult of the gods of Olympus as well as of those of
Asenheim and Niflheim, and, even where not so affected, Christianity was
divided between Arianism and the Orthodox Romanism. With the political
conquest, however, a new order was by no means assured. The Empire was
destroyed, it is true, but nothing firm, solid, or steady took its
place. The wavering new political aggregates put in its stead were no
longer purely Teutonic. They succumbed too easily to the treacherous and
manifold, if silent, influences that on every side assailed them. The
majority of such political groups, whether in Italy, in Gaul, in Spain,
or in North Africa, lost their nationality and even the German language:
they became Roman mong